Pinebook Pro won't boot from SD

Hi all,
I tried to flash Manjaro (20.04) from SD do eMMC. It doesn’t finish well. Shown some errors or so. I did not write them down.

Now I’m trying to boot my PBP from SD. I have now removed and disabled eMMC. PBP boot from SD, but is stuck on Manjaro booting logo (20.08) and no errors in tty1.

PBP won’t boot from Manjaro emmc installer image (20.04).
PBP won’t boot from Manjaro 19.xx (from previously used SD card before flash attempt).

I don’t have eMMC2SD adapter or UART cable right now.

What do you recommend to me now?

I’m sorry for derailing your topic but what is a PBP?
Edit: Pinebook Pro?

Yes, about Pinebook Pro.

I’ve had a similar issue. It seems that writing a working SD card image is very finicky or error-prone for some reason.

I wanted to remove my existing Manjaro install with a different flavour. After trying four different SD-cards (all four high-quality, bought in reputable stores), three different SD interfaces, and both “dd” and Balena Etcher, I was finally able to get an XFCE image of 20.08 to actually boot.

The working combination was an 16GB Sony card; with Balena Etcher on an Ubuntu installation; using the built-in SD reader on a Lenovo X260.

Notably, the same (verified) downloaded image, on the same Sony SD card, failed to boot properly when I used “dd” on my PBP. I get the exact same thing you do: A spinning boot logo, and nothing else.

Same image and Balena Etcher using a USB SD interface writes fine and verifies with no issue, but the PBP doesn’t even recognize it as a bootable image. An earlier (20.04) image on a different SD card written using that USB SD interface boots just fine.

All these cards are perfectly fine when opened as a file system, and verify fine. Perhaps something is broken with the bootloader. Notably, rebooting doesn’t work either with recent images; the screen becomes garbled.

Thanks. I tried everything on one SD cart flashed by DD in USB dongle. This combination always worked for me earlier.

But still I have here one Samsung SD I previously used as system drive. Maybe here is difference between firmware boot loader in SoC and uBoot writen in eMMC and this cause the issue.

At the end I succeeded with SanDisk ultra micro SDHC I 16 GB and with Balena Etcher.

I failed with SanDisk edge micro SDHC I 16GB A1 (older version) and with Samsung 128 GB EVO.

Flashed in microSD card reader in Thinkpad T490.

So just keep trying different SD cards and different readers.

Now I struggling with flashing Manjaro to eMMC …

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Emmc was no problem for me. Booted the SD card, downloaded the image I wanted (just scp’d the same image from the other laptop), unpacked then ‘dd’ from the image file to the device. I don’t think I’ve had a failure doing that yet.

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