Apologies if I’m just not seeing it, which is entirely possible, but the Troubleshooting section of the manual says that you should “Download the MNT Reform System Image from the MNT Research website and flash it to a fresh SD Card” as one of the steps… but I can’t find one.
I can find the tooling to make an image, but not a pre-compiled downloadable image. Is there one I’m just not seeing somewhere?
Go to Pipelines · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab and find last successful build job. Click on … menu and select download artifacts. The 3+ GB archive contains latest image, rescue image and DTB files. The reform-system.img.gz you can pipe from zcat to dd to flash onto SD card.
Note that this is CI pipeline artifact which means it was not tested to be bootable (only to be buildable).
This is the latest image as of now (anyone reading this in the future should look for the newest one): reform2-imx8mq · Artifacts · build (#426) · Jobs · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab
The file for the SD card is reform-system.img.gz. Unzip it and write it to the SD card. If you’re on Windows, you can use Win32 Disk Imager, on Mac or Linux use dd:
dd if=reform-system.img of=/dev/sdcard bs=1024
Replace /dev/sdcard with your SD card device. It should be the SD card itself, not a partition, i.e. no p1 on the end, because the image contains multiple partitions.
If you want to write the system to an SSD, use the reform-migrate script or rsync.
The reform-rescue-system.img.gz file is for the internal eMMC storage, not SD card. You don’t need to use this unless you change the hardware dipswitch to boot from the boot partition on the internal eMMC instead of the SD card.
Just to add my own notes: you can avoid having to gunzip the image if you open it with zcat and pipe the result to dd. Or you could just use something like Balena Etcher, which is cross-platform on Linux, Windows, and Mac, will happily read a compressed image, and does a verification pass too.
It even takes away the foot-gun by warning you if you’ve selected a surprisingly-large disk on which to write the small image…