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?