Pinebook Pro won't boot after manjaro-arm-installer install on emmc. U-Boot problem?

ARM Technical Assistance
1

When used from a system booted from the SDcard, and trying to install Manjaro on the emmc, manjaro-arm-installer bricks the pinebook pro, reproducibly.

The issue is similar to Partial boot after installing manjaro on emmc, only here I can’t even access to an emergency shell from encrypted SDcard.

manjaro-arm-installer needs to be tested urgently on pinebook pro, when reinstalling on emmc from an SDcard, and in other situations. Or this is a U-Boot problem?

The bug is really too serious: complete bricking of the pinebook pro. Unable to start a Manjaro image from SDcard.

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I installed Tow Boot’s spi.installer.img on an SDcard, to try to recover my pinebook: Tow Boot starts, but it’s buggy. This text scrolls in a loop:

spi.installer.img
spi.installer.img441×1002 118 KB

This suggests that it is possible to boot Tow Boot from an SDcard, and repair the pinebook pro from it. However, spi.installer.img need to be fixed.

I have two pinebook pro:

However, pbp2’s situation is not ideal, as I found out afterwards that pbp2 cannot start on emmc, only on SDcard.

When in doubt, I do not proceed to the reinstallation of the system on the emmc, which would risk bricking pbp2 as it bricked pbp1.

2

It very likely is. We recently downgraded the u-boot package to a known working version (2021.04), so you could try again.

The Pinebook Pro cannot be complete bricked, because you can disable/remove the eMMC and SD cards will then be chosen as boot device.

This is a known issue when running the spi.installer.img from SD card, while having a u-boot on eMMC. To get around this, remove the u-boot from eMMC.

I know this situation is not great, but we shouldn’t expect regressions to happen in upstream u-boot, but it did happen in this case. We still recommend going the Tow-boot on SPI route.

3

Ok, I removed the emmc since pbp1 is too old to have a switch.

I followed these instructions:

I then installed Tow Boot on the SPIFlash with spi.installer.img installed on an SDcard.

I then reinstalled the emmc chip.

Reboot OK, the system boots on the emmc.

Thank you very much for your suggestions! pbp1 is also repaired.

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