Get Trixie from SD card to internal storage on Pocket Reform i.MX8MPlus

MNT Pocket Reform
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Hi.

My i.MX8MPlus Pocket Reform stopped booting from internal storage after one of my many updates on Debian Unstable.

I found the Trixie stable image : reform.debian.net -- MNT Reform system images put it on an SD card and can now successfully boot.

I would like to now get the image on to internal storage but can’t seem to find a comprehensive step by step guide - just something AI spits out (which I would not want to use) or partial posts on the forum.

I’m unsure how much of the process running the reform-migrate script covers and how many prior steps I would need to follow.

If possible can anyone point me to step by step guidance from when the image first boots from the SD?

Thanks!

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Hi @r0ss welome to the forum!

Do you want help with recovering that system? I hope you did not loose any data?

If you have this output still around (please do not send the same query again) I’d be interested in hearing what “AI” spits out for this.

You did the right thing by coming to this forum to ask your question. Unfortunately I think there does not yet exist much documentation about this. I think the best we have right now is this table in the handbook:

I think the command you want is reform-setup-encrypted-disk. You have a SSD, right? Could you please read the man page of the tool or its --help output and give me feedback whether what you read there answers your question? If not, I’d like to expand on the topics which are not clear to you directly in the documentation.

Thank you!

3

Hi Josch. Thanks for your reply and apologies for my late one (work destroyed me at the end of last year and then the holiday season(!

1 Like
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Hi Josch.

So - here is kinda the steps I followed with my architecture to successfully get back up and running.

Probably needs a little bit of tweaking and is for my own combination of versions/architecture but it may help others.

## Restoring system image and boot to MNT Pocket Reform

### Dependencies and versions

#### MNT Pocket Reform

Architecture: imx8mp

Storage: internal EMMC only

Image: [December 2025 imx8mp]( Artifacts · build (#16760) · Jobs · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab )

### Steps to recreate

#### Boot into Pocket Reform via MicroSD and correct image

- Flash the image on to a suitable microSD

- Boot Pocket Reform from microSD

- Login as your newly created user (do not need to be root)

#### Prepare internal EMMC to be flashed

- From terminal run lsblk to determine which disk to format

- On the imx8mp architecture it is likely ‘mmcblk2p1/mmcblk2p2’ but check the storage size it’s likely 116.1G

- Launch gnome-disks

- Select ‘SD Card Reader’ maybe with identifier ‘X29128’ (or at least it was for me)

- Again to help you confirm you are looking at the correct storage device partition 1 is likely to be 512MB and partition 2 is likely to be 125GB

- Click on partition 1 and then click on the gear icon below

- Choose ‘format partition’

- Select ‘Erase’ then click on next - no need to change anything else

- Click on partition 2 and then click on the gear icon below

- Choose ‘format partition’

- Select ‘Erase’ then click on next - no need to change anything else

#### Use reform-tools to flash from the microSD card you booted from to the internal EMMC storage device

- The reform-tools scripts (at least the reform-migrate one) all assume we have an SSD and have example devices listed to that effect - we’re going to go our own way here

- We’re running a system with a fully installed Pocket Reform image - so we’re going to need to choose partition 2

- Run ‘sudo reform-migrate --emmc /dev/mmcblk2p2’

- Once the main image content is copied to partition 2 you’ll be prompted to choose where to copy to /boot

- Choose /dev/mmcblk2p1 - you’ll remember it is the smaller partition from when we were looking at gnome-disks

Once all prompts are completed you should be good to completely power the Pocket Reform down (don’t reboot) and then remove the microsd card.

Power up and you should be in a freshly installed official Pocket Reform Debian (unstable).

## Troubleshooting

If like me you got over excited and didn’t format partition 2 you’ll need to follow the gnome-disks formatting steps above.

I then also did not format and erase partition 1 - so the ‘reform-migrate’ bailed out half way through. I just ran ‘reform-boot-config’ once I had formatted partition 1 and it wrote to the /boot partition just fine.

If you’ve not formatted the drives the rsync steps of the scripts fail likely telling you there is not enough space etc.

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If you are starting fresh and do not want to preserve an existing system fro the sd-card, you can also use reform-flash-rescue format and install a vanilla system image to eMMC automatically without having to partition manually.

If you want your system on eMMC to be encrypted, you can run reform-setup-encrypted-disk emmc.