Pinephone Braveheart does not boot from SD card any more

[wgarcia]

Since two weeks ago, I stopped being able to boot burned UBport images from the SD card, I've tried already 6 or 7 different images, the last one from yesterday. The phone boots fine the images of other SO (I tried Mobian, Manjaro and Luna OS and all boot fine).

I've entered an issue in Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/pinephone/-/issues/117

I've tried with two different SD cards just in case, but same behavior.

I also tried to clean the userdata partition, with the following steps:

Press and hold power and volume up.
It boots into "updating", but should be ignored, wrong splash.
Plug the phone into a Linux computer with the red cable.
Run:
sudo fsck /dev/sdb10

But still doing the same.

[AppLee]

@wgarcia
Hi, I have the exact same issue.
Someone on reddit mentionned that we need a serial cable over the jack to help debugging.
It seems Dalton or Marius (I can't remember) needs more input on this issue.

Does someone know where I can find the specs for this cable ?
Alternatively one can purchase this cable at Pine64's: https://store.pine64.org/?product=pinebook-serial-console

But I think I can hack something with and old jack cable and some serial link I already have.

[kugiigi]

How did you burn the image to the sd card? Etcher or dd or bmap?
bmap is know to work best for UT since the OTA support was implemented.

[wgarcia]

@kugiigi dd and Ubuntu Disk Creator from desktop. I used these same two methods a lot of times before with UBports, and it is also the method I use for the other distributions, and they work perfectly fine.

Take into account that the image does start to boot, so it seems it is correctly burned, but it doesn't manage to boot.

I tried bmap as you suggested in the Gitlab issue but it didn't work for me, it produced an error, I don't remember now exactly which.

[wgarcia]

@AppLee I do have a serial cable, and I produced a log which you can see in the Gitlab issue:

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/rQNQ4kgQxM/

[cefre00]

I have exactly the same issue, but at first just after flashing the card I managed to boot up the phone. After sometime it got frozen and can't boot back on ever since.

[doniks]

@AppLee said in Pinephone Braveheart does not boot from SD card any more:

Does someone know where I can find the specs for this cable ?
Alternatively one can purchase this cable at Pine64's: https://store.pine64.org/?product=pinebook-serial-console

But I think I can hack something with and old jack cable and some serial link I already have.

I managed to make one myself. In the end it wasn't too hard. You need an audio jack with three contacts, e.g. from old headphones. Make sure you know which of the three wires connects where.

then I used this serial adapter: https://store.pine64.org/product/padi-serial-console/ but you could as well use others

and here they explain how to wire it up: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone#Serial_console

Let me know if this is clear!

[tsar_chasm]

Hey @wgarcia, I think I've got the issue you describe. pawlinski recently posted a workaround on the pine64 forums which worked for me.

"I also had problems with images with OTA. The solution was to upload the first OTA image to the microSD card:
https://ci.ubports.com/job/rootfs/job/rootfs-pinephone-systemimage/1/
Then naturally update via OTA. Now everything works fine."

[wgarcia]

@tsar_chasm Yes, that solved it. Too bad so many good solutions are buried in the Telegram chats.

Also as a constructive suggestion it could be helpful to add at the Gitlab readme that current images do not boot unless you start from this one.

[cefre00]

Thank you for posting this.
I have just flashed this to the eMMC but no luck, after 4 tuxes appear it restarts, like it is in a bootloop. I managed to boot the latest image from SD, why on Earth it is not working from the damn eMMC???

[wgarcia]

@cefre00 Better open a new post for your problem.

[lala]

@wgarcia hey, just got my phone. whats the best micro sd card?