Banana Pi M2 Ultra - Can't boot from EMMC if microSD inserted

meGAmeS1 · April 26, 2018, 2:34pm

Hi,

I have a banana pi M2U and I’m trying to boot with the SD card inserted (to use it as a data disk). But unfortunately i’m unable to get my image to boot if the SD card is in the slot (it keeps restarting in loop). There is nothing written on the card, I used dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk1 Bootstrap=1M and I also reformatted it). If I insert the SD card after the boot is done, there is no issue (but it’s not my intended usage).

The image I’m using on the EMMC is this one : 2017-08-27-debian-9-stretch-lite-preview-bpi-m2u-sd-emmc.img.

I found some topics (for my card or similar ones) about it but nothing solved my issue:

Using the DC input instead of USB, that what I was already doing
A procedure to follow to boot from EMMC, but it doesn’t work
A forum about this same issue but with BPI-M3, but I didn’t get how to apply any of the solutions
Replacing every “mmc 0” with “mmc 1”, but it didn’t change anything
And this topic, but I don’t think there was any relevant solution for me

Here a screenshot of the banana pi booting with the SD card inserted

automics · April 29, 2018, 5:48am

Maybe this information will help:

I used this information for Booting with eMMC and with or without SD-Card insert

meGAmeS1 · April 30, 2018, 2:35pm

Thank you for your suggestion, but apparently the file (/boot/script.bin) doesn’t exist:

root@bpi-iot-ros-ai:/home/pi# ls -al /boot/script.bin 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Apr 30  2016 /boot/script.bin -> bin/bananapim2plus.bin

I tried to find where this file was located but I didn’t get any result (find / -name "bananapim2plus.bin" returns nothing)

meGAmeS1 · May 11, 2018, 3:48pm

@sinovoip Have you any tip to give to me so I can solve this issue?

sinovoip · May 12, 2018, 4:25am

you need total format your SD card ,

https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-files/blob/master/SD/100MB/BPI-cleanboot-8k.img.gz

bpi-bootsel BPI-cleanboot-8k.img.gz /dev/sdX

meGAmeS1 · May 21, 2018, 12:34pm

Thanks for info, sadly I’m still experiencing the error though (the path of the drive isn’t something /dev/sd* but /dev/mmcblk1, but I guess it shouldn’t be a problem).

Hitoshi · June 22, 2019, 7:56am

If the SD card can load a ‘boot loader’ at power on, and allow user to select a boot device, it should solve much of the boot problems.