Partial boot after installing Manjaro on emmc

[regivanx]

Hello,

I usually use my pinebook pro with an SD card.

A few days ago I installed manjaro on emmc with manjaro-arm-installer.

After reboot I have the u-boot splash screen, which I have never seen before, then the OS boots up to the login screen, freezes then shuts down.

With the sd card inserted, linux fails to find mmcblk1 and therefore cannot boot the operating system from the sd card, and provides an emergency shell.

On the emergency shell, it is possible to boot a dysfunctional operating system on a USB key, without wifi and without kernel modules.

I asked for help on forum.pine64.org, and wdt replied that u-boot was at fault and that it had to be replaced.

He didn’t tell me exactly what to do.

I found the uboot-pinebookpro page on manjaro’s gitlab, and in the uboot-pinebookpro.install file it says:

New version of U-Boot firmware can be flashed to your microSD card (mmcblk1)
or eMMC module (mmcblk2). You can do that by running these two commands:
# dd if=/boot/idbloader.img of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=64 conv=notrunc,fsync
# dd if=/boot/u-boot.itb of=/dev/mmcblkX seek=16384 conv=notrunc,fsync

I wish confirmation that the problem came from u-boot.

I wish confirmation that the indications contained in uboot-pinebookpro.install are correct.

I also wish to know if these commands would make all the data on mmcblk2 inaccessible, or if this operation would just replace u-boot without touching the rest.

[Strit]

We have had some reports that newer uboot packages does not work correctly. We are looking into it.

In the meantime, I’d recommend you try tow-boot:

Manjaro-ARM

[regivanx]

The proposed solution is not clear to me.

Wouldn’t it be more convenient to install a working previous version of U-Boot, for example the one that existed in manjaro 2023-01?

Where to find this version?

What are the command lines to install it, from the emergency shell?

Knowing that from the emergency shell, I can access the USB key, but not the internet.

[regivanx]

On the U-Boot splash screen it says:

Loading environment from SPIFlash…

I deduce that U-Boot is loaded from the SPIFlash memory, and not from the emmc.

On the pinebook pro wiki it says:

The Pinebook Pro comes with a 128Mbit, (16MByte), flash device suitable for initial boot target, to store the bootloader. The SoC used on the Pinebook Pro boots from this SPI flash device first, before eMMC or SD card. At present, April 19, 2020, the Pinebook Pros ship without anything programmed in the SPI flash device. So the SoC moves on to the next potential boot device, the eMMC. ARM/ARM64 computers do not have a standardized BIOS, yet.

[…]

Even if you need to recover from a defective bootloader written to the SPI flash, you can simply short pin 6 of the SPI flash to GND and boot. This will render the SoC bootrom unable to read from the SPI flash and have it fall back to reading the bootloader from other boot media like the eMMC or Micro SD card.

The procedures described above are a lot less risky than attaching an external SPI flasher and do not require any additional hardware. At present, April 19th, 2020, there is no good bootloader image to flash into the SPI flash device. This is expected to change, as there are people working on issue.

Pinebook Pro - PINE64

I deduce that:

• manjaro-arm-installer presumably installed U-Boot on SPIFlash when installing Manjaro on the emmc.
• This version of U-Boot is unsuitable for SPIFlash.
• I can disable the SPIFlash to try to start U-Boot on the emmc or on the SD card (hardware deactivation).

On the wiki it is also written:

Zeroing out the SPI
In case, you wrote something bad to your SPI, it’s helpful to wipe away that data with zeros. To do that, you follow the same steps above to enter maskrom mode and then write a binary file that consists of all zeros.

1. Create the binary file dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.bin bs=1M count=16
2. Flash the flash helper db file: rkdeveloptool db rk3399_loader_spinor_v1.15.114.bin. If successful, the output should read Downloading bootloader succeeded.
3. Flash the new SPI binary: rkdeveloptool wl 0 zero.bin. If successful, the output should read: Write LBA from file (100%).
4. Test the installation: rkdeveloptool td. If successful, output should read Reset Device OK.
5. Run rkdeveloptool rd to reboot your Pinebook Pro.

Pinebook Pro SPI - PINE64

It is therefore possible to deactivate SPIFlash by overwriting the memory (software deactivation)

However, it is necessary to check on U-Boot is installed on the emmc or SD card, before overwriting the SPIFlash memory, otherwise the Pinebook pro will not restart.

For this I can, “short pin 6 of the SPI flash to GND and boot” and see if the pinebook pro reboots.

Do you think this is the right solution?

[regivanx]

Hi, the problem is solved.

I installed Tow Boot on the emmc which solved the problem.

However, when Tow Boot is installed on the SPI, I have exactly the same problem as with U-Boot: the system does not detect the encrypted partition on the SD card, it does not detect the SD card at all (no /dev/mmcblk1), booting is impossible and I get into an emergency shell.

Procedure:

On another computer, download the latest version of Tow Boot at https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases. Choose the pinebookPro version.

Assume the latest version is pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz

$ wget https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases/download/release-2021.10-005/pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz # download archive
$ tar xvf pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz # unzip
$ cd pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005
$ cp shared.disk-image.img [your-usb-stick-location]
$ sudo -s
# dd if=spi.installer.img of=[your-SDcard-location-in-/dev/] bs=1M status=progress

Then, I plugged the USB key into the faulty computer, and I started it with the encrypted SDcard to arrive at the emergency shell.

Perhaps due to the abnormal boot, I was unable to use dd with the options given in the documentation.

On the emergency shell,

# dd if=shared.disk-image.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1M oflag=direct,sync status=progress # /dev/mmcblk2 is internal emmc memory.

returns an error.

So I used the command:

# dd if=shared.disk-image.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1M oflag=direct conv=fsync

Source.

What worked.

Then I replaced the encrypted SDcard with the Tow Boot SDcard containing spi.installer.img, rebooted and overwritten the SPI memory.

Finally, I replaced the Tow Boot SDcard with the encrypted SDcard, and when I restarted, everything was working normally.

I tried to install Tow Boot on SPI memory, but as I said, Tow Boot on SPI does not detect the encrypted SDcard.

I haven’t tested unencrypted system boot on emmc with Tow Boot on SPI. As Tow Boot works on the emmc, I leave it as is.

Thanks for your suggestion, Strit!