Steps for Moving OS from SD Card to eMMC on A311D

[ditlev]

Hi everyone,

Could someone guide me through the exact steps required to transfer the operating system from the SD card to the eMMC on the A311D? Additionally, I’d like to know how to configure the device to boot from the eMMC without the need for the SD card.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[josch]

I think the official position of MNT is still that it is not recommended to flash u-boot to eMMC on A311D because should that u-boot image be faulty or something go wrong during the flashing procedure, your board will be soft-bricked and require some extra hardware to restore again.

That being said, I can certainly tell you how to do it anyways but performing these steps will come with the risk of making your device unbootable. I don’t know whether you feel like you can recover from such a situation by yourself or not.

What do you think?

[ditlev]

Thank you for the response.

If u-boot remains on the SD card, would it be sufficient to run only the reform-migrate command to complete the process?

[josch]

Yes, you’d run something like this:

sudo reform-migrate --emmc /dev/mmcblk2p2

That would put /boot onto the first partition and the rootfs onto the second partition of your eMMC. If you do not have the correct partition setup, here is how to start from scratch:

Deleted the emmc partition

Hi, no worries, as long as you didn’t delete u-boot on the eMMC boot sector (it takes some effort to do that, though), you can still boot from MicroSD card and use the following part from our factory install script to re-image the eMMC freshly. Copy it to a text file and make it executable (with chmod a+x). The script requires a few tools, to make sure these are installed, do: apt install bmap-tools e2fsprogs parted And here’s the main install script: #!/bin/bash echo "Copying MNT Pocket Re…

[minute]

One thing to consider: At least in my testing, u-boot often (sometimes?) fails to load the kernel from the eMMC on A311D, even if u-boot itself always loads fine from eMMC. The technical reasons are still unknown (I have reported these issues to people working on the drivers). If this should get annoying, to work around this, one can migrate to an SSD NVMe, which is natively supported in u-boot for A311D.

[josch]

@minute oh? That would be news for me. I have my /boot on eMMC with A311D and cannot remember a single time where u-boot failed to load the kernel from it. What could be the difference between my system and yours? My u-boot is the latest version that reform-flash-uboot knows about.

[minute]

Hmm, interesting. Maybe I just had a bad board on the table then.

[soulsource]

I can second whjat josch said. I have both, u-boot and my /boot partition in eMMC, and never had troubles loading the kernel.