SD card slot weirdness

MNT Reform
1

I’m asking this for informational purposes more than anything else – this is absolutely not a high priority, just a mysterious thing.

I can only assume this is a configuration issue on my part, but for some reason, I can’t see my sd slot when I boot via an eMMC boot partition and an encrypted nvme drive.

I can boot off an sd card in the slot with no trouble, and when I do that, I can (obviously) see the sd card, the emmc module, and the nvme drive. I can use a USB SD card dongle, and that works just fine, so I know the card itself (and the adapter, ‘cause it’s a micro SD card) work okay — I can boot with it and I can read/write to it via the dongle.

But when I boot normally, the sd card is just invisible. I noticed that I also don’t have /dev/mmcblk1 entries on my nvme deployment. Is this expected? I’ve had enough weirdness, so maybe it’s time I backup my homedir and do a reinstall?

I’ve got a v2.5 motherboard, I think, and it’s quite possible I don’t have up to date firmware – I haven’t reflashed anything.

reform-check:

I: Contents of /proc/device-tree/model: MNT Reform 2 with RCORE-DSI RK3588 Module
I: uname -a output: Linux reform 6.16.12-mnt-reform-arm64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 6.16.12-2+reform20250910T145641Z (2025-09- aarch64 GNU/Linux
I: Version of linux-image-mnt-reform-arm64: 6.16.12-2+reform20250910T145641Z
I: Version of reform-tools: 1.79-2+reform20251023T130442Z+1
I: Version of system image: System Image v4: 2025-05-02
I: Version of LPC firmware: MREF2LPC 25_R2 20230703
I: Version of U-Boot: 2024.10-g424c714eb247-dirty
I: Latest version of U-Boot: 2025-05-06
I: probably booting via /boot/boot.scr (/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf does not exist)
I: Mount source of /: /dev/reformvg/root (LVM vg ‘reformvg’ on LUKS device ‘reform_crypt’ on SSD)
I: Mount source of /boot: /dev/mmcblk0p1 (eMMC)
I: the following files differ from how they are shipped by reform-tools (ignore /var/lib/alsa/asound.state):
??5??? /var/lib/alsa/asound.state
I: /boot/initrd.img-6.15.4-mnt-reform-arm64 does not belong to any installed kernel package
I: /boot/vmlinuz-6.15.4-mnt-reform-arm64 does not belong to any installed kernel package
I: the reform-qcacld2 package package is only required for wifi on the Pocket Reform with i.MX8MP, you can safely remove it unless you plan to go back to the imx8m+
I: eMMC contains the latest u-boot version 2025-05-06

One of the differences is this:
I: Version of system image: System Image v4: 2025-05-02 – pretty sure when I boot off the SD card, this shows as System Image v5.

lsblk from the emmc+nvme boot, with the SD card in the SD slot:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk0 179:0 0 233G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 488M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 232.5G 0 part
nvme0n1 259:0 0 953.9G 0 disk
└─reform_crypt 254:0 0 953.9G 0 crypt
├─reformvg-swap 254:1 0 4G 0 lvm [SWAP]
└─reformvg-root 254:2 0 949.9G 0 lvm /
mmcblk0boot0 179:256 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk0boot1 179:512 0 4M 1 disk

lsblk when booted from the SD card:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
mmcblk1 179:0 0 59.5G 0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 179:1 0 488M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk1p2 179:2 0 59G 0 part /
nvme0n1 259:0 0 953.9G 0 disk
mmcblk0 179:256 0 233G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:257 0 488M 0 part
└─mmcblk0p2 179:258 0 232.5G 0 part
mmcblk0boot0 179:512 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk0boot1 179:768 0 4M 1 disk

Like I said, this is probably a me problem.

2

I have been seeing that here as.well

1 Like
3

That’s okay. This line is just supposed to show how old the system image was from which you installed your current system. That information is “stored” in /etc/motd.

Maybe not. I had it happen to my motherboard 2.5 that the sd-card slot became unreliable. It turns out that one of the metal pins which was involved in detecting whether an sd-card was inserted or removed got bent over time such that it didn’t work properly anymore. Bending all the metal pins back a tiny bit through the metal case with a thin stick fixed the problem for me.

1 Like
4

Classic Reform with motherboard 2.5 and RCORE-DSI upgrade?

5

thats the one

I was thinking that it might be a kernel issue but not sure

6

I’ll give that a try – it’s interesting that it seems to have very consistent behavior:

  • Boot off the SD card, the SD card is visible
  • Boot off the eMMC + nvme, SD card is not visible.

That said, I could easily see uboot ignoring the “sense” pin and just assuming (correctly) that something is there and using it, resulting in a working system that of course “knows” the SD card is there.

Possibly related, I did discover, very accidentally, that I can insert an SD card into the slot backward and it goes in and engages the soft-click mechanism. I could easily have bent the pins when I did that.