PineBook Pro: Snafu When Flashing Manjaro-KDE Image - Overwrote Bios?

Gentlepeople,
I sat out to renovate the kid’s PineBook Pro (PBP) by bringing it to Manjaro’s KDE image (ours was still shipping with the initial debian derivative).
I grabbed the image, successfully dded it to an appropriate microSD and managed to boot the PBP from it.
I installed the manjaro-arm-flasher and proceeded to follow the menues … I choose rock64 as the image to use and then did (what I believe to be) a crucial mistake:I was offered 3 storage devices to flash to. One had a numbered partition and the other didn’t. I concluded the one with te partition to be the internal eMMC and proceeded with flashing to the DEVICE rather than its numbered partition. All finished well, but now I’m left with an unbootable PBP.

Can some kind sould dissect this with me, find the crucial mistake and advise how to remedy it?

Thank you for your consideration. Balin

A couple of things.

Yes. Was a crucial mistake. You should have chosen pbpro.

Should be flashed to the block device, not a partition.

To fix it you should run the Manjaro ARM Installer again, and select pbpro and the target device should be /dev/mmcblk0|2 depending on where you flash it from.

Thank you very much for you hint. The problem is I’m now faced with an unbootable device - won’t boot with or without th micro SD inserted. No reaction of the power led now matter how lon or short I press the power button …

Yeah, that’s a problem. You will have to take apart the device and take out the eMMC module and flash it on another machine with an adapter. Or do the drive hot binding trick from the Pine64 wiki.

Can be found here:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Troubleshooting_guide

Ah. You mean to imply:

  1. Disable eMMC and hope that device now boots from microSD

  2. Boot from microSD & make use of hot-pluggability of eMMC and reenable it

  3. Reflash eMMC

?

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Yes. That’s about the only way to get a “bricked” emmc back.

OK. I shall be reunited with my tools tomorrow and will try this. Many thanks. I will report back.

I also read that opening the PBP while having the back cover off is not advised … I will have to be careful. Does anyone have experience with opening/powering the PBP up while having the back cover off?

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I have now managed to rescue this and the pbpro image 20.10 is installed and purring like a kitten.
Instrumental to what I ended up doing was this post: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9174&pid=62426#pid62426

Here’s my recipe:

  1. Open the back of the PBP … careful with the speaker cables!

  2. Switch off the eMMC (see number 24 on this scheme https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Pinebook_Pro_Internal_Layout).

  3. Boot into Manjaro from a microSD (with the back cover off).

  4. While the system runs, switch the eMMC back on.

  5. Make the system see it (and ensure you know the mmcblkX assignment) like so:

    PROMPT> lsblk #  Shows the device name of the microSD booted from ONLY
    PROMPT> echo 'fe330000.sdhci' | tee /sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/unbind
    PROMPT> echo 'fe330000.sdhci' | tee /sys/bus/platform/drivers/sdhci-arasan/bind
    PROMPT> lsblk # Now also shows the device name of the eMMC - note down for the flashing
    
  6. Install manjaro-arm-flasher and flash a pbpro(!) image onto the block device deduced from point 5 above.

Enjoy!

P.S.: Not being able to include above links as links and not as pseudo-code (as they are now) is a pain.

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