Now my Phone is an expensive Brick. It shut down half way through the Upgrade, Now won’t boot.
hmm - I have been there too - I have made my phone unbootable countless times.
Not bricked - but it do require some effort to get back up.
Is it a Pro Explorer edition or the earlier community edition?
Good info on PinePhone - PINE64
If the phone uses Tow-Boot
- power down the phone compeletely
- apply power and hold volume-up until the led blink blue
- connect the phone to your computer using the usb-c cable
- open a terminal and list block devices, you should have a new block device
- verify it has the same size as your phone - two partitions
Clone the manjaro-arm-installer from gitlab
git clone https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/applications/manjaro-arm-installer.git
cd into the folder
cd manjaro-arm-installer
Switch to root
su
Be sure you have the correct block device (use the unstable branch - it is most up-to-date)
bash manjaro-arm-installer arm-unstable
This will take a while.
You can shortcircuit the route by writing to an SD card instead of directly to phone eMMC - then place the SD card in the phone and powerup - if I recall correct - sdcard takes priority over eMMC.
It’s the PinePhone, Not the PinePhone Pro
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/
PINEPHONE – Beta Edition with Convergence Package Linux SmartPhone
It should be fairly easy to get tow boot on the phone’s spi if not already.
The LED never blinks Blue. It turns Green then shortly after the Phone Vibrates and then Green light goes out, the shortly after the Green light come on … etc It just cycle like that.
Then the phone does not use tow-boot.
Then you need a microsd 2G - just follow the tow boot guide - when the phone is started you will be greeted with an interface to write tow-boot to spi, erase tow-boot from spi (not applicable) and power down.
pinephone always proritize sd over emmc.
I have spent quite some time fiddling with pinephone - I passed on the pinephone a couple of years back, when I took the pinephone pro in.
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I will have to get one tomorrow. We were heading out to get a new SIM anyway.
For the flashing of tow-boot - get as small an sd-card possible - I have tried with 8G but didn’t work - but an old abandoned 2G worked perfect - I don’t know why.
It’s unlikely I’ll be able to get a 2Gig, or anything smaller than 8Gig So that might be a problem
It could very well have been my 8G which was at fault - just mentioning for the record.
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From TowBoot page PINE64 Pinephone (A64) | Tow-Boot and the Github page Tow-Boot/boards/pine64-pinephoneA64/INSTALLING.md at released · Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot · GitHub
# dd if=mmcboot.installer.img of=/dev/XXX bs=1M oflag=direct,sync status=progress
Where do I get mmcboot.installer.img come from. Or for that matter…
# dd if=spi.installer.img of=/dev/XXX bs=1M oflag=direct,sync status=progress
spi.installer.img
You find the relevant archive → Releases · Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot · GitHub
More precisely https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases/download/release-2023.07-007/pine64-pinephoneA64-2023.07-007.tar.xz
So I’m guessing libreComputer-allH3CcH5-2023.07-007.tar.xz is the correct one, since it has ‘all’ in it’s name.
It’s thunder and lightning here, and our Starlink keeps dropping out.
NO - use the one for pinephone - click the show all assets link at the bottom of the release entry
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OK done.
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Looks like I’ll have to wait till Friday now, the SD Card reader on my computer is no longer working. So I’ll have to get a USB external SD card reader.
Got that file down, and extracted mmcboot.installer.img and ran
dd if=mmcboot.installer.img of=/dev/XXX bs=1M oflag=direct,sync status=progress
The dd seems to have worked ok.
Unfiortunately the phone cycles through the cycle of Red LED Vibrate then LED turn Green
Good - as soon as red light up - press volume up - this will make the led turn blue - and your device is in storage mode - you can treat it like another disk on your computer.
Then you can use dd to write a new image to the phone or use RPI Imager if a GUI is preferable.
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No Joy, I’m afraid. I’ve got a 64 Gig SD card, the smallest i could get on Monday. I’m going to get a USB SD Card Reader, so I can do this on my Computer, and see if I can get a smaller SD card at the same time.
So I’ll try again on Friday.
When you have the phone connected to your computer - try listing the usb devices
lsusb
You should get something like this (this is a pinephone pro - expect yours to be different)
The important stuff is Mask ROM mode
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 2207:330c Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company RK3399 in Mask ROM mode
Then when running
lsblk
You should get something like (again this is pinephone pro with 128G eMMC
sdf 8:80 1 115,2G 0 disk