Re: Booting CURRENT from PinebookPro SD over 10-RELEASE on eMMC

[Matthew Widup <widupmm%proton.me@localhost>]

Hello Joel,

One of mine will only boot from the SD card at power-up, but not at reboot.  And occasionally it won't boot from it even then.  Some of these problems are probably inherent to the SOC, others I attribute to peculiar versions of U-Boot.

As far as I know, all Pinebooks Pro do have the eMMC disable switch. I have a newer model that does not look like it has one, but it does; just not in the position indicated by, nor does it look like the switch in, the official images.  I have seen several people that didn't find it at first, but it turned out it was there (myself included).  I haven't done it yet to any of mine; but it sure would be nice to drill a hole in the bottom cover where that switch is located.

I don't know where there is documentation on U-Boot.  But I was able to discern most of how to use it from the help command.  I don't recall exactly how to pick a boot device but I do recall that it wasn't trivial.

FWIW, I too have trouble with these mailing lists.  But my trouble is always my email client (Proton Mail for android) converting my messages to HTML.  The list only accepts plain text.  Also sometimes it removes the cc to the list (it just did this now).

Matt

Sent from Proton Mail Android



-------- Original Message --------
On 6/28/24 2:09 PM, Joel wrote:

> On 6/28/2024 11:46, Matthew Widup wrote:
> 
> > Hello Joel,
> > 
> > Are you able to boot a different operating system from SD card?  Manjaru, Debian, or NetBSD 10-RELEASE?  If so, most likely your image isn't bootable.
> > 
> > Otherwise, disable the eMMC and see if it will boot; then most likely you could replace the U-Boot on the eMMC with a different one.
> 
> Hi Matthew -- yes, I confirmed the SD with CURRENT is bootable.
> 
> I had already responded to Martin but sometimes my email provider (SDF) has trouble with this mailing list and it is either delayed or dropped. Here's the summary:
> 
> Just after I sent the original email, I rebooted again and sure enough it did boot the SD with CURRENT that time. It looks like it's random which device comes first.
> 
> My goal is to learn the u-boot cli and see if I can force which device. Or use the NetBSD boot cli to choose the kernel on the SD, whether the SD or eMMC booted first. And finally, just reboot a couple times until I get lucky -- evidence of my laziness to remove the screws from the PinebookPro back cover and take the eMMC out.
> 
> BTW, my version of the PinebookPro doesn't have the switch on the board to choose eMCC or SD (PINE64 docs indicated it should, but looks like not all do).
> 
> Thanks - Joel