Flashing librem5 stuck on Searching

Hardware Librem 5
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19

Have your tried the sd method?

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still working on getting access to acetone to melt the anti-interdiction nail polish so i can get access to the sd plug

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21

That could be relevant. USBGuard?

You realise that the µSD card goes in the SIM tray on the side? So you could never have used this as a mobile phone?? (OK, I admit that I have not used the Anti-Interdiction service, so I don’t know which things get covered in glitter polish.)

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i have not

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ok got into the sd plug

  1. i’ve got a sd card formatted with librem5r4.img (via dd if=librem5r4.img of=[device] )
  2. powered down L5
  3. plugged in sd card
  4. held down vol- / powered up L5
  5. L5 came up and can now see the sd card(!) in ‘disks’
    however not seeing where in the file manager to open it

booted into the L5

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ie should i have just formatted the sd card as ext2 and put the img file in it instead?

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Yes, but which disk did it boot from?

For this approach to work, you have to be able to boot the phone from the µSD card - so that you can then safely obliterate the contents of the internal eMMC drive. (By default, the phone boots from the internal eMMC drive.)

I strongly recommend not proceeding further until you can confidently answer the above question.

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reasonably confident it booted from the eMMC drive (since networking isn’t working, which is why i’m trying to reflash)

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@librem5user1o1
A good way to find out is to make a file or something that isn’t there already while booting normally and then try to boot from the sd card and see if that change you made is there

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all my files appear in my home directory so it stands to reason it’s booting from the old eMMC

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Sometimes it takes several tries for me to get it. So I just try again

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what i did

  1. take sd card out of phone
  2. wget https://arm01.puri.sm/job/Images/job/Image%20Build/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/librem5r4.img.xz
    (grab latest crimson (?) from jenkins)
  3. xz -d librem5r4.img.xz
    (get just the image)
    ( md5sum gives c31d89e6d9ed767f30de15571ac2492b librem5r4.img )
  4. dd if=./librem5r4.img of=/dev/sdm bs=8192 status=progress
    ( my devuan machine autopopulates it into sdm as i put the sd card into an audio recorder with a sd card slot to give filesystem access, this should write the image to the sd card )
  5. sync
    (to ensure write was complete)
  6. unplug audio recorder / sd card
  7. plug sd card into L5
  8. press and hold vol-
  9. press and hold power to boot L5

which got me into a new kind of lock screen! default password 123456

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31

now for some reason wifi isn’t connecting lol oi
ok fixed that by changing from wpa3 to wpa/wpa2 (?)

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32

WPA3 is not supported on Byzantium using the SparkLAN Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card:

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downloaded new image …opened in files, directed to reformat eMMC with it …shut down, removed sd card…restarted …and i think i have a newly flashed crimson L5! thanks for help y’all

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That link points to the Byzantium image

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In any case
lsb_release -c
will tell you.

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yeah i should clarify: i grabbed that one for booting into the sd card but used a https://storage.puri.sm/librem5/images/crimson/latest/librem5r4/plain/artifact/librem5r4.img.xz once i was able to actually download on the L5 itself

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37

it’s definitely booted to crimson – settings OS shows crimson. I did it right with help from the above :slight_smile:

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When it gave me issues, I was able to do it with a removed battery, only inserting the battery once the USB was in (which only sometimes worked (it’s been a while since I flashed a Librem 5 though)).

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