All android buillds on wiki for Microsd missing GPT?

[morrolinux]

Is there any way to make the SD Card build of Android Bootable? I just want to test couple things on android and dont want to remove my current OS on the eMMC.

Yes. I was able to get the stock Android image to boot from SD. Just download and flash it. Etcher doesn't complain about the missing boot information with it.

Well etcher does complain here ^^ also it doesnt boot from SD Card, it just boots the eMMC

Hmm, have you tried booting the SD with the eMMC switched off? You might have to try flashing it again, or using another flashing tool. ApplePi Baker has been best for me, but I don't recall if it's Mac only or not.

It would be nice to get updated images. These are incredibly difficult to work with. Most will complain about the boot stuff (I can get over that,) but then just don't boot. I had 0 luck with the SD card images. Not one would boot, after using Etcher or dd. It wasn't until I switched from my main mac, to my other one in Ubuntu, and rebooted it back into OSX that I was finally able to burn one that booted (it was the stock Rockchip img, not one of the SD-prepared ones, in case anyone's wondering.)

If these images are se finicky for any reasons, it'd be helpful to know, so we could accommodate instead of fumbling and getting frustrated.

I'm not sure I understand what you actually did here.
You rebooted OSX and tried again flashing with Etcher? You flashed under Ubuntu with Etcher?

Also what do you mean by "it was the stock Rockchip img, not one of the SD-prepared ones, in case anyone's wondering" ?
you haven't used the one called "Stock Android for DD method [micro SD Boot] [20190918]" but the other one called "Stock for RK Flash tool [SD Boot] [20190427]" ?
Don't you need a windows tool to burn the latter?

What I found out myself is: 
- My sandisk extreme micro SD cards won't boot or will get stuck on a "dead android" logo boot loop (but others have reported no issues with their sandisk extreme... maybe a different version?)

1) I tried with a cheap 16GB kingston card and it "booted" to an "Erasing" screen, followed by a reboot to the typical "Android" logo boot splash screen, except I never got past that screen, even after 1 hour it was stuck there.

2) After forcing a shutdown from point 1) I pulled the SD card and plugged it back in my main computer where I used testdisk to recover the GPT partition table, four partitions were detected. I've mounted all of them, One of those needed to be fsck'ed.

3) Then I tried again to boot the SD card and this time after a couple of minutes I got an actual Android login prompt, where I used the password "rock" but then got a message saying that my "data" (partition) is corrupt and cannot be decrypted, inviting me to press "factory reset", so I did.


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Here is where things got extremely random and frustrating:

4) The first time I did all the above I was brought to the Android recovery where I did wipe "data" myself. Then I rebooted and received an error complaining that "cache" was corrupt and needed to be wiped too (awkard since the recovery reported to have wiped the cache as well). Anyway I never managed to get into the recovery again. Even repeating the exact same previous steps for all the evening. 


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5) Now it just get stuck on the Android boot splashscreen.