Beta13 Inability to boot on PinePhone (non-Pro)

I got my Pinephone (non-pro) this Monday and all my playing around with it seems to show that all Manjaro Plasma versions work fine (= as fine as is to be expected with beta level software), apart from the beta 13.

As soon as I update from an older version (tested with the very old one that came from factory, though there I kinda messed up with updating, but also with a fresh PlasMo beta 12 image) to beta 13, it stops booting and flashing a fresh PlasMo beta 13 image on an SD card (or directly to eMMC with jumpdrive) boots sometimes, (roughly half the time for me), but any subsequent shutdown and reboot fails to boot that image, even if I changed nothing (something broken on growing the file system to fit the eMMC/SD?). My boot process then looks like this: press power button, get LED indicator lights, get vibration, then nothing. No screen backlight, no screen image even with powerful flash light from the front (meaning it’s not just the backlight that’s off), no ssh server booting (which I set up on some installs prior to it being bricked) - but it’s also not off. Holding power button again doesn’t boot again, because it’s still “trying to” boot, I have to hold the power button for a long time to force kill it, then I can (unsuccessfully) retry booting with the same way. This happens no matter if I’m booting from SD or eMMC.
I’d like to provide more actual information, but I don’t have the UART adapter thing and with no screen image or ssh access it has proven rather difficult to get any logs - happy to provide more info if someone has an idea how to get to said info.

EDIT: I’m fairly certain my hardware is fine, as right now I’m running postmarketOS on the eMMC and that is stable and actually manages to boot more than once. I’d like to use Manjaro though as pmOS is quite a few releases behind on Plasma and I’m getting some general bugginess/weirdness in the shell from it that I didn’t have on Manjaro

EDIT2: I’ve flashed the images like the pine64 wiki described with dd: dd if=/path/to/image.img of=/dev/<sd device path> bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync. When flashing directly to eMMC via Jumpdrive I got fsync failed for '/dev/sde': Input/Output error from dd which suggests broken eMMC, but it still booted, postmarketOS is fine on the eMMC as well and the behavior is identically broken when Manjaro is on the SD card, so I don’t think that’s it.

EDIT3: It seems that Manjaro Phosh beta 28 is also not booting properly on my device while Phosh beta 27 is doing fine. I’ll see if an upgrade from 27 to 28 breaks again, same as Manjaro Plasma PlasMo beta 12 to 13 broke. — And it seems like the update broke, though it also did freeze the UI mid update so that may not be conclusive. I also just tried the latest dev release of Manjaro PlasMo and that’s also not booting, same issue. What change was made independently of desktop environment between 9 days and 2 months ago that could prevent booting?

@Chairmander -
I do have to agree with you in stating that this is an issue. I took a break from updating my PInephone and also had issues when booting up both Phosh Beta 27 & 28. Manjaro Plasma was fine.

Eventually went back the image that came out on 10/29 (although i dont think it matters which one, i just picked one) and was able to update to newest. Took awhile to download and install all the updates but it eventually installed. Currently now on kernel 6.1.0-1-MANJARO-ARM phosh. Both installs are using the nightly build branch.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like it’s probably an issue with the Kernel as I don’t think anything else is loading at this stage (since I’m not even getting the KDE Logo boot screen or any display out, really). I just don’t know what to do about it. Interesting to hear Phosh beta 27 doesn’t work for you while Plasma beta 13 does, for me it’s strictly just the newest beta release of both Phosh and Plasma that don’t work, with the most recent before that working. Both Phosh beta 28 and PlasMo beta 13 are on Kernel 6.0.3 it seems, while the ones before that are 5.x (Phosh on 5.19.8 and Plasma on 5.18.9). Since they’re not mainline I don’t know what else has changed, but it seems it’s something that my Pinephone didn’t like. Is there a way to install another Kernel version on the newest image to see if that works (chroot?)

I was also not able to straight download the newest images for either and to have them work. Only way i have found is to upgrade. Same thing when trying to boot them - black screen, hear one click and then nothing. I want to say i tried couple nightly builds since the beta release and same thing.

When you cite a Beta number, please make sure to always specify which edition you refer to, because Phosh Edition betas and Plasma Edition betas are released and numbered independently. (There was a Phosh Beta 13 a long time ago, well, “long” by mobile operating system standards.)

Good point, I’ve updated it to be more explicit

I have no idea what the issue was, but the new Plasma beta14 seems to be working now, at least survived through setup, changing color theme and restarting which is a lot more than it did before.

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