RockPro64 boots on SD but not on eMMC

Hello there,

I've been using my RockPro64 for a couple of weeks booting from a SD card without issues. The thing is that I've just received my eMMC module and flashed the LibreElec image (based on instructions from the Pine64 wiki) but I got this error when trying to boot it for the first time:

rockpro64 emmc grep: /proc/net/pnp: np such file or directory  ***
Error in mount_flash: mount mount_common: Could not mount UUID ...

...

followed by several other errors and ending up with a Kernel Panic.

First I thought I had a defective eMMC card, but I tried one of ayufan images and it worked perfectly on the very first try. By the way I kept the sd card installation and it keeps booting from it without errors.

These are the LibreELEC images I tried so far: LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-9.1.502-rockpro64 (the latest stable one) and RK3399.arm-9.80-nightly-20191031-cfe1640-rockpro64 (the latest nightly one).

I tried to flash them using both BalenaEtcher (with default configurations) and the following dd line (both on Linux and macOS, and from two different computers):

sudo gdd if=bionic-minimal-rockpro64-0.9.14-1159-arm64.img of=/dev/disk6 bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

(I've tried a couple of variations, as for example the macOS coreutils gdd and Linux dd, another values to parameter bs, etc. No success).

Am I doing something wrong? Isn't the LibreELEC images compatible with eMMC modules? Could anyone please point me in the right direction?

Quote from Joern-p

Hi xleox,

try manually fresh installation on the device:

- boot libreelec from sd card.

- make a libreelec backup.

- copy libreelec backup

- copy the image file to libreelec, for example in the path Downloads..

- ssh session to libreelec

- use parted /dev/your_emmc (print ;to look partitions, rm #number; to delete all partitions on emmc; possibly umount emmc partitions)

- go to path download

- dd if=LibreELEC-RK3399.arm-9.1.502-rockpro64.img of=/dev/your_emmc bs=1M && sync

- remove sd and reboot

- if it worked, restore backup

Greetings

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Hi Joern-p,

Thank you very much for your prompt reply. You see, the thing is that when I boot with both the SD card and the eMMC module inserted, although it boots normally from the SD card after boot it apparently doesn't recognize the eMMC module (so that I imagine I won't be able to use parted, dd nor any other tool on the eMMC from the running LibreELEC).

In fact, this part of dmesg probably gives a hint on what's going on (I guess mmc1 would be the inserted secondary eMMC module):

[    1.194237] mmc1: SDHCI controller on fe330000.sdhci [fe330000.sdhci] using ADMA
[    1.243171] mmc_host mmc0: Bus speed (slot 0) = 150000000Hz (slot req 150000000Hz, actual 150000000HZ d
iv = 0)
[    1.341959] mmc1: MAN_BKOPS_EN bit is not set
[    1.366028] mmc1: mmc_select_hs400es failed, error -110
[    1.366497] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising MMC card
[    1.388406] dwmmc_rockchip fe320000.dwmmc: Successfully tuned phase to 222
[    1.388422] mmc0: new ultra high speed SDR104 SDHC card at address aaaa
[    1.388848] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SB32G 29.7 GiB
[    1.390625]  mmcblk0: p1 p2
[    1.482760] mmc1: MAN_BKOPS_EN bit is not set
[    1.511032] mmc1: mmc_select_hs400es failed, error -110
[    1.511039] mmc1: error -110 whilst initialising MMC card

I googled it and apparently it's due to some lack of support in kernel to this given eMMC. That would explain why it works on other images (probably Ayufan's is optimized to that specific feature and the RockPro64 version of LibreELEC isn't).

So the problem is I can flash LibreElec image on the eMMC but I can neither boot it as the system disk nor boot it as a secondary disk.

I really don't know what to do now.

Quote from Aciel

Mainline and Nightlies images of RK3399 doesn't support eMMC device block yet.

If you want the eMMC support then try images by balbes150

Hi there Aciel,

Thank you for your reply. I've taken a look but apparently there's no image by balbez150 especially to the RockPro64 board.

Anyway, I've seen a thread referring to a image developed to the NanoPC T4 board. Is this the one I'm supposed to use?