An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[Humid Stylus]

Help needed

Forgive my noobiness, but I need some help.  I want to make the move from Windows to Linux.   I have used linux for a few years, but not seriously.  Now I am getting serious! 

I was gifted a Pinebook Pro for my birthday and am trying to try out different distris.  Machine was installed with Manjaro, but I wanted Ubuntu, so a friend of mine installed Armbian (on the emmc), which is really lovely, but I want to experiment with other distris on the sd.   

So, I cloned the Git repo for this script described here and it goes through the installation process, seemingly successfully.   When I go to start my machine, it just starts Armbian and ignores the debian installation on the sd card.  This is what I have done to test

• to make sure my sd drive is working correctly, I inserted the the copy of Armbian which was dd'd to my emmc.   It booted fine.  So SD is not the problem
  
• I thought that maybe it could be a dud card, so I tried another one, much quicker, that I know works and I get the same result, nothing and then boots from emmc
  
• I've mounted both SDCards and they were successfully written to
  

So, I am beyond my knowledge at this moment in time.

I would really appreciate some guidance here

This u-boot stuff is quite new to me but based on https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=...le_Storage your problem might be that the PBP doesn't even try to boot from SD anymore. The default order for the chip seems to be eMMC then SD and as you have a valid image on you eMMC the SD is never tried.

From what I gather you have two options:
1) Destroy your eMMC install making the chip boot to SD (probably not a good solution)
2) Convince the u-boot on your eMMC to boot from SD.

It is not clear to me if it is possible to do option 2 for one time only like is common with the x86 bios "Select boot device" or if this is a more permanent solution like change a config, build a u-boot, install it to disk and from that moment it will always boot from SD if there is a bootable card in the slot.