PinePhone Pro and the eMMC

Recently tried to upgrade an old PostmarketOS/Phosh install for my Pro, which was my main install, and things went sideways. It works well enough to send txt and make calls but just about everything else got messed up. I'm sure it could be fixed but I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to install something new and install on the eMMC (internal storage) which I haven't messed with on either the Pro or CE. Maybe eventually I'll turn this into a larger notes file for the Pro but for now it'll be a document of the journey.

Figured I'd have to boot something from SD and then install from there and, while I believe that's an option, I learned that by plugging the phone into a laptop via usb and holding volume-up while booting the phone can be seen as a USB mass storage device. The docs mention you shouldn't flash directyl from here but I think I'm just gonna do that.

Opted for the newest weekly release of plasma-mobile as I've been enjoying Plasma Mobile on Manjaro, but it hasn't seen updates in a while. Hoping this will be more up-to-date.

On my laptop:

cd ~/Mobile/PinePhonePro/
wget https://images.mobian.org/rockchip/weekly/mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.img.xz
wget https://images.mobian.org/rockchip/weekly/mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.img.bmap
wget https://images.mobian.org/rockchip/weekly/mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.sha256sums.sig
wget https://images.mobian.org/rockchip/weekly/mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.sha256sums
wget https://repo.mobian.org/mobian.gpg

gpg --import mobian.gpg
gpg --verify mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.sha256sums.sig
shasum -c mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.sha256sums
# ^^^ prints OK

# Mounted at /dev/sdaX

For me, the phone mounted at /dev/sdaX and I'm going with a dd install to avoid installing anything else:

unxz mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.img.xz
sudo dd bs=64k if=mobian-rockchip-plasma-mobile-20260208.img of=/dev/sda status=progress

Took about 5-10 min to flash. Held down the power button ~10 seconds to reboot. Came back with a white status light, so that must just mean it's booting from eMMC, same as when SailfishOS was installed.

So, this didn't work. Started to boot but then the status light flashed red (this happens w/ boot issues) and the phone proceeded to go into a boot loop. It could still boot via SD by holding volume-down.

Also tried the mobian-phosh build, which didn't fail, but did hang for at least 30 min with a blank screen (figured it was resizing the drive) before forcing a reboot. Still hung. Trying postmarket-phosh next:

wget https://images.postmarketos.org/bpo/edge/pine64-pinephonepro/plasma-mobile/20260213-2222/20260213-2222-postmarketOS-edge-plasma-mobile-6-pine64-pinephonepro.img.xz
sha512sum 20260213-2222-postmarketOS-edge-plasma-mobile-6-pine64-pinephonepro.img.xz
# ^^^ check output
unxz 20260213-2222-postmarketOS-edge-plasma-mobile-6-pine64-pinephonepro.img.xz
time sudo dd bs=1M if=20260213-2222-postmarketOS-edge-plasma-mobile-6-pine64-pinephonepro.img of=/dev/sda status=progress conv=fsync
# ^^^ ~7 min

Rebooted and…got the postmarketOS splash screen! This leads me to believe there's an issue with the pinephonepro/rockchip mobian builds.