A friend of mine got fed up with her Pocket Reform always killing its batteries in storage and and gave it to me to “do whatever” with. The first thing I have to do is make sure it’s clean of any personal/sensitive data.
I’ve got the latest system image written to a micro SD card, but the machine does not boot it, using the eMMC instead always. Even if I remove the m.2 SSD causing it to fail to mount rootfs, there doesn’t look like any way to get it to prefer the SD card.
With my classic Reform, there’s a switch on the imx8mq SoM, but I haven’t found anything like that on the RK3588, and the documentation is… sparse.
Does anyone know what I need to do to get this machine to boot off the SD so I can wipe it with a clean system image and maybe find a new home for it?
Try a different SD-card. The RK3588 has a bootloader (u-boot) which will prefer booting the system on sd-card over the system on emmc. If that doesn’t happen, then I suspect it cannot read the sd-card for some reason?
The first one I tried was a 16GB SanDisk card, it worked with a 32GB PNY card. I’m not sure what’s different here but I got it logged in so I can wipe the eMMC and SSD now.
After booting from an SD-card, I would wipe the SSD the normal way by dd-ing it with zeroes. Due to the SSD’s wear leveling this might not securely destroy the data on the SSD. If you want to be sure that all the data is gone, you might want to use a more specialized tool than dd.
To set up the eMMC back to how it got shipped, there is a script called reform-flash-rescue. It needs a working internet connection to work as it will download the latest system image and flash that to eMMC.
If you experience any problems with that script, please let me know. Since I only have one Pocket Reform, I am not regularly testing that script.
I used nvme format to wipe the SSD and used bmaptool to copy the same system image onto the eMMC as I used to make my SD Card, but that’s good to know about the reform-flash-rescue tool.