TRS-80

I can only imagine how happy @rpardini will be not needing to re-base any more. Jokes aside, kudos to you, you must be thrilled all your hard work will be seeing the light of day, finally. Thanks for sticking with it all that time.

Thanks for the feedback. Just to confirm, you have one of the more recent batch?

This is a (somewhat) long standing and well known issue, check PineBook Pro subforum here, there are a number of threads about various booting issues (including eMMC specifically). I think the problem (with the latest batch of PBP which were shipped, anyway) is that those came with Manjaro on the eMMC and no universal bootloader (tow boot) flashed on the SPI chip. Well thinking about that now, I guess burning to eMMC should still work, but it doesn't for some reason. Have you tried using armbian-config (and/or (the unfortunately named) nand-sata-install which can also be reached from there) to try and write the image to the eMMC? If you already overwrote the eMMC previously I guess there is nothing left to lose. I have this hardware but I just acquired an old headphone cable which I still need to fashion into a serial cable before I can proceed further. And I have yet to collect enough 'tuits' of the round variety.

This thread sounds oddly familiar (but I'm not going to bother searching). Anyway, I encourage you to consider configuration management as a separate concept to 'imaging the entire OS as a backup' as there are a couple problems with the latter approach: It wastes a lot of space. Upgrading in-place between major OS versions is not (and has never been) supported in Armbian, so sooner or later you will probably have to re-install everything anyway. In the configuration management space there are things like Ansible (and many, many others) in fact just searching up that term should give you plenty of ideas.

I think you should read his reply(ies) again (and some others in this thread), perhaps more carefully this time, as I came away with a different interpretation.