Soft bricked PBP after uboot update

ARM Technical Assistance
1

Hi guys,

About 2 hours ago, I updated my Manjaro install on my pinebook pro and notice that the pacman shown a message about updating uboot and to use lsblk to find out which device my install was, so I restarted my pinebook pro first and then I updated my uboot using the 2 dd commands it provided and changing the mmcblkX to mmcblk2 since that is were the default install was, then I shutdown it and cold power up the pinebook pro.

Once it power up, the new uboot messages greet me along an autoboot but then the screen just went crazy with a green artifacts, then the screen went black and got stuck with only the power led with a green light (soft bricked I guess). I then tried using an microSD card with same results, tried an USB, same results but this time the logs went a bit slower so I was able to read that it tried to load the initram disk and some other stuff.

Fortunately, I have 2 pinebook pros so I went ahead and tested the microSD and USB on the other PBP, which worked without an issue as expected. At this point I was positive that it was related to the new uboot being broken, so I proceed to disable the emmc using the hardware switch on the first pinebook pro and test again, but nor the microSD nor the USB worked… then I installed a fedora image into another microSD and… IT WORKED!, so I went ahead and update the microSD with manjaro and updated it’s uboot, then test again on the pinebook pro with the emmc disabled, which shown the new uboot messages and failed to boot too.

At this point I know for sure that the uboot is broken, but the question is, how to revert to the previous version to get my emmc install back?

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Finally fix it by disabling the eMMC using the hardware switch, then installing Manjaro into a microSD without updating anything, boot into the microSD, re-enable the eMMC using the hardware switch (without shut it down), and finally repeat the same 2 dd commands as before (the ones provided by pacman on my previous tests) into the eMMC.

Once that was done, I simply shutdown my pinebook pro, removed the microSD and VoilĂ ! it worked again :smiley:

Looking forward to try to install the new uboot in the future once it is stable and not broken, will probably try using a microSD first to test it out next time :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
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Same problem here. My issue is now that my SD card reader is broken, so I don’t have an easy way to fix it for now. Actually, this is kind of annoying to me. I consider myself really lucky that I just got myself an old thinkpad a few days ago, before that, the pbp was my daily driver and only machine

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Update: I don’t know what happened, but my PBP now booted fine (aside from some graphics glitches). I will try to downgrade the bootloader

Edit: I foolishly shut my laptop, after which it didn’t come up again. Booting from a USB-key containing Arch Linux arm worked fine, to my surprise. So apparently, my issue was different from the one OP was experiencing. I solved my problem by removing a second output kernel parameter I had in my extlinux.conf

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