Pinebook Pro Armbian from SD doesn't boot after apt upgrade

[mountainman]

I bought a Pinebook Pro two weeks ago. It came with Manjaro KDE preinstalled on EMMC. I wanted to try out Armbian, so I downloaded the Bookworm XFCE image from May 27th. In order to get the SD booted, I first flashed Tow-Boot for Pinebook Pro (pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz) from github Tow-Boot to the SPI. Then during boot after pressing ESC the menu lets you select the SD card for boot. The first boot to Armbian worked well. I could set up user, timezone and everything. The XFCE desktop looks very clean with a reasonable selection of software. Well done, team!

 

But after I upgrade the system with apt update & upgrade, the next time the machine is booted and SD card is selected, armbian won't boot anymore 😞

The upgrade seem to have broken something. I tried it twice, the second time freezed the kernel-upgrades in the armbian-config tool prior to upgrading it. Didn't help. Manjaro from EMMC still boots ok.

 

Attached is a screenshot of the failed boot process, after I selected SD card to boot on the Tow Boot menu.

[Igor]

IMO its best to remove this half working Tow-Boot and use boot loader shipped with Armbian.

From the chat:
 

Quote

You need to poweroff between reboots of different media types (mmc to sd card) most of the time due to inconsistencies with TowBoot

 

[mountainman]

The boot loader from Armbian, is it included on the Bookworm image for pinebook pro? 

 

So if I reset the SPI flash to all FF's (the device was shipped that way) and dd the Armbian_23.5.1_Pinebook-pro_bookworm_current_6.1.30_xfce_desktop.img to the EMMC (overwriting Manjaro), there is a boot loader that provides the functionality to default-boot the Armbian on the EMMC, and offers a option to boot from SD card during boot process?

[TRS-80]

On 6/21/2023 at 7:19 PM, mountainman said:

The boot loader from Armbian, is it included on the Bookworm image for pinebook pro? 

 

It should be.

 

On 6/21/2023 at 7:19 PM, mountainman said:

So if I reset the SPI flash to all FF's (the device was shipped that way)

 

OK

 

On 6/21/2023 at 7:19 PM, mountainman said:

dd the Armbian_23.5.1_Pinebook-pro_bookworm_current_6.1.30_xfce_desktop.img to the EMMC (overwriting Manjaro)

 

I got mine working by installing the Armbian image using the nand-sata-install tool, but that was from an older version of Armbian.  I am not sure what that does, if it just copies it like dd does then this will work.  But if not then you might have a bad time.

 

In particular, I would not recommend over-writing something that "works" (even though for me I hate Manjaro and KDE and therefore it never did "work" for me, lol) but I hope you take my meaning.

 

On 6/21/2023 at 7:19 PM, mountainman said:

and offers a option to boot from SD card during boot process?

 

I am not sure if this is supported in Armbian or not.  Part of the problem is that the PBP has kind of weird boot order where it prefers eMMC over SD card.

 

Putting all the above together was why I decided to leave Tow-Boot on my SPI, at least for the time being.  It gives a lot of options which can be helpful, especially in case of recovery.  Maybe Armbian get around to addressing the boot loader situation at some point, until then I would be careful about what you do, or you might end up with a paperweight!