PinePhone A64: Can't enter Jumpdrive mode #230
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I believe I have the same exact situation. I can install tow-boot to the emmc from balena, when I try to reboot with the volume up / power button, it buzzes and flashes red and eventually gives up. Were you able to get the device to boot mobian or any os off the emmc? If I remember correctly, I removed the emmc partition with gparted and my computer turned off before I could create a new one. Not sure if that should matter. I can install tow-boot to emmc with no error using this command:
I used tow-boot to fully erase emmc with success, and then installed tow-boot to emmc with success messages. Thanks! |
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I wasn't able to boot anything except the Manjaro Plasma which my PP came with (not even a re-image of that) from eMMC yet. If you have a spare 3.5mm TRS/TRRS plug and a USB-serial converter, you can DIY a serial console cable, flip the audio killswitch, and get some logs out of the various bootloaders, like I did. Maybe something in there will help the devs help us with our issue, who knows. |
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Thanks @sven-frotscher ! I will look on ebay for the 3.5mm TRS/TRRS plug and a USB-serial converter, definitely like having more logs around to look into! If i understand, the 3.5mm would go into my headphone jack and usb into computer, yes? I did manage to get mobian back on my Pinephone A64 emmc, by using the image pointed to here: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?pid=116155#pid116155 I flashed the above image with balena etcher to an sd card and then booted with the sd card into Jumpdrive. With Jumpdrive on screen, I was able to flash the above image to emmc with balena etcher. Then it booted (no sd card) just fine from emmc. However, I think I still need to install tow-boot back onto the emmc to have a 'proper' installation, if I understand correctly. |
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Yes, 3.5mm plug into the headphone jack, 3 wires (GND, Rx, Tx) to converter, converter's USB to computer. See the PP wiki article for details and for links to some ready-made console cables, if DIY/soldering isn't your thing. Did I read that forum post correctly: I "just" need to boot Jumpdrive from a microSD and use that to flash Mobian onto the eMMC? Won't that overwrite Tow-Boot? Or do I then need to reinstall Tow-Boot onto eMMC using its installer? |
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Ok great thanks for the info, I just now flashed the tow-boot mmcboot.installer.img to sd, booted and with the tow-boot interface, "installed tow-boot" to emmc. When I rebooted without power + up/down, it continued normally to the mobian that I already had on emmc. When I try to boot with power button + vol up, it stops and has a blank screen with the blue led lit, for at least 10 minutes, so I gave up. I don't know if it should have booted to tow-boot or not? I rebooted normally and it loaded into mobian again. So all said, mobian continues to run fine off emmc, and I don't know if tow-boot is on the mmc boot record. When I boot it plugged in via usb, I see rootfs in the file manager. I open balena etcher and see that the options for where to flash an image to show Linux UMS disk 0 (boot, rootfs) 31.GB /dev/sda and that is with no sd card in the PP. So, I am a bit confused as to if I have tow-boot working or not. |
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Tow-Boot goes into Jumpdrive mode if you hold Vol+ while booting, so you should see the eMMC as a disk (rootfs) when connecting it to your computer. Confusion could be minimized if it also showed something on screen in addition to turning on the blue LED. |
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When the PP is off and I plug it into the laptop usb without holding down any button, it boots into mobian and I see the message on my laptop: Connection 'Wired connection 2' activated So then I power off (still plugged into usb). Then I do the power + vol up to boot the device. IThe PP shows red led, then blue, I let go, and on my laptop I get the message rootfs with the option to mount and open (from dolphin file manager, I believe). I do not know if that is tow-boot at work or if that would happen without having "installed" tow-boot as described above. I do not know how to determine if tow-boot is installed properly. |
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'Wired connection 2' seems to be a USB network connection, while rootfs is almost certainly Jumpdrive at work. Since your PP boots both Mobian and Jumpdrive successfully, I think you installed Tow-Boot into your eMMC correctly. |
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Ok thanks, I am a little confused, still. I had mobian installed already, before I installed tow-boot, and I was only able to get mobian onto the PP with Jumpdrive intially. I was not able to install mobian before all of this, even though I had tow-boot on the emmc. So, I have not successfully installed tow-boot on a blank emmc, and then installed mobian afterwards, so I will attempt that process, just to make sure I am not depending on Jumpdrive to have mobian installed. Because I thought with tow-boot installed, you could power on with power + vol up, but that does not give me the tow-boot interface in the current state. Thanks again for your suggestion and help! |
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You flashed https://images.mobian.org/pinephone/mobian-pinephone-phosh-12.0.img.gz in order to install Mobian, correct? |
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Yes, that was via the Jumpdrive image above on my emmc, not via tow-boot. |
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If I boot with usb to laptop and power + vol up, it stays black, but I see it in Gparted: /dev/sda1 boot ext4 boot ... flags: boot, esp So I am going to delete the two partitions and load the tow-boot installer onto sd card, then boot the sd card and use the interface to install onto a blank emmc, and then try to boot without the sd card and see if tow-boot loads an interface. If I don't see an interface, but still get the continuous blue led, then I will flash a fresh mobian via balena. Does this seem like the best way to start from scratch? |
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Yes, that seems like the way to go for starting from scratch. Maybe you also need to zero out the beginning of the eMMC before installing Tow-Boot, I'm not sure. |
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My PP boots Jumpdrive from microSD with a USB connection, but doesn't show up as a USB device of any kind on my computer. Connecting a serial cable somehow messes with the boot process (not even a Jumpdrive splash screen) and shows: after which it just hangs. Update: The hanging seems to be caused by my USB-Serial converter or by PuTTY since Jumpdrive prints out a command prompt ( Update 2: Switching USB cables (or using both the USB-Serial converter and the logic analyzer, not sure), I can get Jumpdrive to boot to the splash screen and command prompt ( |
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See dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive#85 and dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive#63 for the issue report, but no solutions (yet? One can hope...). |
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@gitcoo it sounds like tow-boot is working as expected. U-boot doesn't have a driver for the display, so the only interface you'll get is the blue led and a usb connection. @sven-frotscher perhaps it would be possible to pinpoint your issue a bit more
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Big thanks for the confirmation, it's onward from here then! ;0) |
Booting the Jumpdrive microSD (disk image linked above), I get a UART shell if I connect a logic analyzer in addition to the USB-Serial converter (I think the GND levels on the TRS connector make Jumpdrive hang otherwise). This gives me the following info:
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I tried that with the eMMC Tow-Boot (crazily mashing Escape): [menu, I select Firmware Console] What else can I try in that console? Should I also try that with Tow-Boot on a microSD (e.g. the Tow-Boot installer image)? |
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The view from jumpdrive looks alright, /dev/mmcblk2 is the emmc. Did you check if you were able to access it over telnet to make sure the usb port is functional? Is mmcblk2p1 formatted fat32, or does it just have the flag set on it? I'm not totally sure if that error means u-boot doesn't know about the emmc, or just the partition. You could also try running |
The Jumpdrive-only image from dreemurrs' repo doesn't want to make a USB connection to my PC, but the one included in megi's multi-boot image does (network connection and block devices for eMMC and microSD). I'll try flashing the eMMC using that.
That seems to work, at least partially. |
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Looking at the partition labels, GParted and the contents of the partition on the eMMC on my computer, I must have flashed an x86 bootable ISO onto the eMMC somehow. No wonder every aarch64 bootloader under the sun complains about that 😅 Wish me luck with flashing Mobian :) |
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Mobian seems to boot, but not much more: The Mobian splash screen shows up around the At least it is now a Mobian issue, not a Tow-Boot one anymore (I think). |
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Update: The kernel panic only happens with https://images.mobian.org/pinephone/mobian-pinephone-phosh-12.0.img.gz, the current weekly image boots and runs fine. Thank you for your help, @ArenM! |
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The question of no USB ethernet/block devices when powering on Tow-Boot with Vol+ or when using the Jumpdrive image standalone is still open. What does megi's multiboot/p-boot do differently to make Jumpdrive work for me? |
I'm following Mobian's install instructions for the PinePhone and getting stuck at booting the phone into Jumpdrive mode.
As requested on the Mobian wiki page, I installed Tow-Boot on my PinePhone by following these instructions.
The install seems to have worked, booting without a USB connection or microSD card directly after the install shows this:
Serial terminal log
poweroff ..., the LED flashes red and the phone vibrates 10 times.However, when I continue to follow along with the instructions in the Mobian wiki (Option 2: Mounting the target device's eMMC using TowBoot) by holding Volume Up while connecting the phone to my computer using a known good USB-A-to-C cable, it behaves almost identically (only the two lines below the
boot menumessage in the log have changed and the LED briefly lights up blue during these lines):Serial terminal log
As you can see, holding Volume Up accomplished almost nothing.
So, where did I go wrong? Did I brick my PinePhone by flashing the eMMC too often or is there a different issue at play here? I'm also not opposed to diagnosing this further, but someone would have to walk me through that.
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