Can't boot spi-installer on pinebook pro about tow-boot HOT 11 CLOSED

Thanks, with those pointers I managed to boot from the SD after erasing the SPI. Tow-Boot installed fine and can boot itself too. Thanks for the help!

from tow-boot.

I ran into this issue as well with the December 2021 U-boot release. I ended up using nandwrite to write the binaries/Tow-Boot.spi.bin file from the 2021.10-004 release. For anyone who was just as worried as I was, it did flash successfully after writing 379 blocks.

from tow-boot.

I've just been going through this too. on an original october 2019 pbp there does appear to be something in the spi from the factory, and the original mr fixit debian doesn't expose /dev/mtd0 even with mtd-utils installed. what I've done is to install current manjaro to an sd card and boot from that. manjaro does show /dev/mtd0 so you can install mtd-utils (with sudo pacman -S mtd-utils) and do sudo nandwrite -p /dev/mtd0 Tow-Boot.spi.bin from there. Unfortunately for me I now can't boot anything but the emmc since the keyboard in my pbp is broken and the tow-boot I installed is defaulted to boot emmc first doesn't seem to recognise usb keyboards.

from tow-boot.

I can't seem to boot the spi-installer.img though

What do you mean from that? On a Pinebook Pro, the initial boot firmware selected will be, in order, the one in SPI, the one on eMMC or the one on SD. So if you have U-Boot on SPI, the IBF installed on the SD card will never itself boot.

But, that doesn't mean the SD installer can't work. If you select, somehow, to boot from SD, it should be able to do something with it. Hopefully present you with the bootmenu-based menu to erase/install. Though maybe there's a bug... The spi-installer.img as released might not work correctly depending on what U-Boot booted it. Currently it has been mainly tested against the same revision Tow-Boot build. It is something to work on, actually test and use the SPI installer outside of Tow-Boot so a user can upgrade to Tow-Boot.

Now for other methods of installing:

Do you have a U-Boot installed to the SPI Flash? You could erase it so the Tow-Boot on SD is used, which in turn should be able to "boot itself".

Alternatively, you can "just" write firmware.spiflash.bin to the SPI Flash. I don't know how, haven't investigated yet, but it is possible on Linux.

Otherwise, with U-Boot the important commands are those:

Where mainly, it loads the firmware binary, the if ensures the script fails if loading fails.

Then, sf probe makes the SPI flash device available, sf erase is more of a formality, I'm not 100% positive it is strictly required. Finally sf write well... it writes the firmware! But if you were to just run those commands, I would invite you to instead just sf erase +1000000 and then boot the SD card SPI installer. This way you can ensure the Tow-Boot version there should work.

from tow-boot.

Same problem here. The SD card also wouldn't boot, but I could run sudo nandwrite -p /dev/mtd0 Tow-Boot.spi.bin from Linux, and after writing 379 blocks Tow-Boot was installed.

On Debian/Ubuntu, nandwrite is part of the mtd-utils package.

Maybe this should become an official instruciton?

from tow-boot.

I installed nandwrite, but I don't have a /dev/mtd0 device. How do I enable that?

from tow-boot.

/dev/mtd0 is provided by the kernel. If it is not showing up, then you are missing a kernel configuration/driver. I am not 100% sure, but I think the config needed is CONFIG_SPI_ROCKCHIP=y for the rk3399.

from tow-boot.

Just so others know, the direct writing way worked for me too;
dd if=Tow-boot.spi.bin of=/dev/mtd0

(/dev/mtd0 may not be listed in lsblk, but you prolly still have it in /dev....) Thanks to the original poster mentioning this route. Tow Boot on Pinebook Pro worked fine.

from tow-boot.

Can't boot from SD spi installer either for RockPro64 here.

from tow-boot.

Thanks, with those pointers I managed to boot from the SD after erasing the SPI. Tow-Boot installed fine and can boot itself too. Thanks for the help!

what was exact solutions please? I've been struggling with this for many days now. I can boot to SD Armbian. And I even Deleted the UBOOT from emmc manjaro (which is why manjaro will not boot).

-- I also deleted the SPI using /dev/mtd0 000
-- and I tried to install Tow-BOOT..bin directly to the SPI but it would not boot or show me Tow boot icon or text.
-- I also made many different SD cards with SPI.installer on them using both Linux to make them and also Windows Balena Etcher. none of the SD would show tow boot menu. they just have dark blue screen, no text , no iron, nothing. I have now tried 30 different SPI. I made them on many different SD cards. I tested if they were good, bc then I also wrote Armbian to same SD cards and Armbian all boots up for me.
-- I even did one suggestion which was to delete 2 lines to remove uboot completely from the emmc manjaro, which means manjaro doesn't boot. but the SD SPI still will not show anything but a blank dark blue screen.

from tow-boot.

Just so others know, the direct writing way worked for me too;
dd if=Tow-boot.spi.bin of=/dev/mtd0

I tried this too from within Manjaro when I still had it working and from within the SD Armbian boot up.
Nothing happens when I reboot, no tow boot menu or icon. I Followed some instructions on Arch that show how to Delete the SPI first also and then do this install but nothing works so far.

ARe there more additional steps you took that I might be missing?

from tow-boot.