How to change OS after installing Android

Hello,

Heads up, I’m a newbie user but the problem is that I installed Android OS on my M3 when I got it some months back but quickly determined that I wanted a Linux based OS. I have the SD card all ready but the M3 won’t even look at it when booting and insists on booting to Android on the eMMC. I have put the board away and occasionally pull it out to try again. I have seached the internet for ways to do this but it seems you can only do it after booting to a bootable SD card and using a “dd sudo” command, the loop continues, how to force boot to SD …

Any help would be greatly appreciated because this is driving me crazy, does Banana Pi get a kickback from Google or something, lol…

Steve

which linux image used? how did you flash the Linux image. Bootable sd has higher boot priority, no matter what on emmc, so confirm your Linux image download correctly and flash to SD completely.

That should be pretty easy - even there is no official support, this is one of your best chances for Linux based OS. https://www.armbian.com/bananapi-m3/

Thank you, I will try that tomorrow But does it have a tool for wiping the eMMC that Android is written to?

Nothing there about selective booting. I wonder why they didn’t include a jumper to disable eMMC booting, would have made this board so much more versatile and useful. I have the original Banana Pi and the M3, now I find them useless and money wasters. I now have a Raspberry Pi 4b and wonder why I even went down the path of wasting money on Banana Pi’s. I might just sell them both on eBay and see if I can get $30-40 for them, a far cry from what I spent but something is better than paperweights.

If you are flashing SD card correctly, there could be a problem with your SD card slot. It is possible …

When SD card is inserted, it should boot from there. Then you use standard Armbian flash utility to flash to eMMC.

When you have installed an Android OS it boots directly to eMMC and bypasses the SD card.

I have tried with new 32GB Sandisk SD Cards as well as a variety of others that boot easily to my Raspberry Pi 4b and Pi Zero boards. They are also recognised by Windows (regardless of partition type and if it can be read or not (comes up as needing formatting if written with a PI OS))

The problem it definitely with the Banana Pi bypassing the SD Card once Android is written to the eMMC

isn’t there a button you can hold down while powering up?