Bricked RK3588 Pocket Reform

MNT Pocket Reform
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I was tinkering with installing NixOS on my Pocket Reform a couple months ago and dd’d the eMMC u-boot partition in the process. I was hoping the solution would be as simple as described here: Recovering a possibly bricked RK3588 Pocket Reform . However, after tracking down the Pocket’s RK3588 system image and writing it to the SD card with bmaptool, I was still greeted with a blank screen on boot.

I then tried connecting a USB-C cable to the SYSUSB port on the motherboard and bridging the J21 jumpers as described here: Flashing eMMC Bootloader / Unbricking (IMX8MP) - #7 by digitalrayne . I know this was for the IMX8MP SoM, but I figured I might get similar lsusb output on my desktop. Sadly I get nothing. No connection events show up in dmesg output either.

I bought a UART-USB adapter, but I’m unsure of how to proceed after wiring it up. I wouldn’t know how to flash from the serial console regardless.

Side note:

The Pocket Reform Documentation page needs to be updated. I spent a while spinning my wheels because “MNT Pocket Reform Firmware and System Image Instructions” links to expired build artifacts.

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when i was using a UART adapter to troubleshoot my Void install, i think i had TX and RX the wrong way around — is the TX cable plugged into the RX pin and the RX cable to the TX pin? that should be the correct configuration.

for clarity, when you say you say the eMMC u-boot partition, is that /dev/emmc2boot1 and /dev/emmc2boot2? i’m not totally sure how to help if that’s the case, but knowing that should be helpful for someone more familiar with the hardware/bootloader to know.

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I have limited experience flashing firmware via UART-USB, it’s only with RISC-V chip. I’m waiting on my Reform order yet to be shipped. Despite this, I recommend taking a look at the RK3588 documentation from Firefly.

The iCore-3588Q is documented here: Welcome to iCore-3588Q Manual — Firefly Wiki

And specially to the debug section:

This might help you move forward while waiting for the other experienced users in the community provide their input.

As sleeplessval said, make sure to match the RX/TX connection and the baud rate. Those values are mentioned into the articles above.

And important, the boot loader and system image should be from MNT, don’t recommend to use the one mentioned at Firefly articles.

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There is no dedicated partition for u-boot on RK3588. It gets flashed onto the eMMC between the partition table and the first partition which usually begins with an offset of 16 MiB.

If you overrode u-boot on eMMC with something which is not a bootloader then the system will fall back to loading u-boot from SD-card.

Can you show which system image exactly you flashed to your SD card?

Any “unbricking” recipe is only necessary if you managed to flash a broken u-boot to eMMC. Did that actually happen? You said you dd’d the eMMC u-boot partition and if you mean you zeroed it, then you didn’t brick your RK3588. In such a state it will read u-boot from an SD-card.

That link “MNT Pocket Reform Firmware and System Image Instructions” links to https://source.mnt.re/reform/pocket-reform/-/releases which lists version 20260227 as the latest release and that is correct. That version is even newer than what gets distributed via fwupd which only lists 20251118 as the latest version. I also managed to download the build artifacts. Where exactly did you see the expired artifact links? Lets fix those. :slight_smile:

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Screenshot From 2026-06-29 02-36-05
Screenshot From 2026-06-29 02-36-051256×341 64.5 KB

Those 3 links lead to 404 errors. If I was to follow instructions, would have use them :slight_smile:

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Ah you were reading the release notes of a past release! You are right, those links should be removed. I pinged Lucie on IRC to perform that removal.

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