Flashing to UBports on PP64 Convergence
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I'm trying to flash UBPorts to my Mobian installed Pine Phone 64 Soooo, I used Jump Drive and flash the eMMC directly with UBPorts on my Pine Phone 64. Oh boy, what a fiasco. The issue is, when I set up Mobian I encrypted the files and also created a log in password. When I went to flash to Ubuntu, the Pine Phone wanted the password first. No problem, I entered it. The it flashed the eMMC but I received an error message that the flash was corrupted. After about an hour of reading and trying different options I was finally able to boot the phone back into the original Mobian it came with. Is it possible the encryption of the files when I set this up cause this error? If so, how do you unencrypt them? Is it possible that me setting up a an initial login password did this, or maybe both? If so how can I wipe out the log in password. The bottom line for me is, I'm going to go with Ubuntu Touch on this phone, like my other Pine 64 with 2 gig and 16 gig of storage. My goal, once the Pine 64 is ready for prime time running Ubuntu is to give the 2 gig to my wife and I'll take the 3 gig Convergence version. Any help in trying to get this flashed to UBPorts would be appreciated
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@lt-dillinger said in Flashing to UBports on PP64 Convergence:
If so, how do you unencrypt them?
Maybe you should ask that on Mobian community?
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@keneda I have a post there too and I'm waiting for a reply. I thought maybe someone here might have an idea as this board is a bit more active. I do think that is the key, either decrypt them OR do a hard reset, which I haven't found anything out yet on how to do that.
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If you are using jumpdrive in the pinephone, you would use dd to write the UBports image to /dev/sdX . Make sure you are writing to the whole device and not to a partition (as an example /dev/sdc would be correct, but /dev/sdc1 would be incorrect). dd should not be asking for a password as it writes at the block level. An example of the command I use is xzcat ubports-pinephone.img.xz |dd of=/dev/sdc bs= 4M iflag=fullblock oflag=direct; sync
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@mark1250 So I understand, have UBPorts on the microSD, boot the phone, then go to the terminal and use that command?
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So I understand, have UBPorts on the microSD, boot the phone, then go to the terminal and use that command?
No, you would boot the PInePhone with JumpDrive from the SD card. Connect the PinePhone to your Linux computer with a USB cable and then on the computer find the PinePhone's location using lsblk. Using that information from lsblk command, write the UBports image (ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz) to the PinePhone's eMMC. Pine64 has this info on their wiki.
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@mark1250 That's what I did before, but before the flashing would begin Mobian asked for me to put in my pass code, which I also did. After it was flashed I received and error message which almost bricked my phone. what I need is a way to get ride of the passcode and also the file encryption I did when I first set up the phone. I'm still on the hunt to do a complete reset as I was going to sell the phone but leave Mobian installed. I think if I could get the hard reset done, then the flash would work.
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@lt-dillinger
Booting JumpDrive on your Pinephone connected with the USB cable will allow your computer to see the internal memory of the phone.
As @mark1250 said, you'll have to run the command on your computer and be careful to use the device and not the partition.Just be careful at every step and keep the history of command lines in case it doesn't work so you can share it there for us to review.
Good luck
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If you are not seeing this image on your PinePhone using Jumpdrive on an SD card, then you didn't burn Jumpdrive correctly to the SD card.
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Yes, I get that on my phone, then I use etcher to upload the UBPorts to it. All goes well till the very end, where it uploads and then verifies. Then I get the error message that the eMMC didn't accept the flash. I sent they Pine folks a ticket for help and I'm waiting to hear back from them. I think and I may be wrong, is the Mobian fies on the phone are encrypted, thus locked down and the flash won't take until they are unencrypted.
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@lt-dillinger Try using bmaptool instead. Make sure you put the correct storage or else you may destroy your desktop
Sample command:
sudo bmaptool copy --bmap=ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.bmap ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz /dev/sdd -
@lt-dillinger I've never used etcher, so I unable to help if that's the tool you want to use. You could ask on etcher's forum, else get your hands dirty at the command line.
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@kugiigi Do put this command into the terminal on the phone after boot into UBPorts on the phone?
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@lt-dillinger said in Flashing to UBports on PP64 Convergence:
@kugiigi Do put this command into the terminal on the phone after boot into UBPorts on the phone?
No, you would run that command in a terminal on your PC. You may need to install bmaptool. - If you are on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install -y bmap-tools
Then download the .bmap file and .img.xz file.
Then find the block device of your PinePhone: sudo fdisk -l
Here is what mine looks like:user@ws1:~> sudo fdisk -l ...Snip... Disk /dev/sdc: 29.12 GiB, 31268536320 bytes, 61071360 sectors Disk model: e eMMC Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: F74C6CF1-1978-405E-8D1A-7177BEDE414D ...Snip...Then using @kugiigi command:
sudo bmaptool copy --bmap=ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.bmap ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz /dev/sdc -
Ok, I've got email(s) to the Pine Phone folks and they are looking into some options too. I'm going to hold off a bit to see what they say. I can't believe that within Mobian you cannot uncrypt your files, or do a hard reset that take Mobian back to square one.
