Re flash fails after following instrucions

[SteveBNH]

I followed these instructions to reflash a Librem5 on Pop_OS (not a VM) and constantly fail.

Reflashing the Librem 5, Up-to-Date Tutorial

This was really bothering me because the reflashing instructions here, Reflashing the Librem 5 – Purism, and here, Reflashing the Phone, are wrong. Therefore, here is my new tutorial and post so people can find it in search: I recommend having a Linux computer running a current version of Debian, but most modern Linux distros will likely work. Reflashing the Librem 5 is the best way to remove your personal data and put the phone back into factory defaults. Warning, this procedure will compl…

This is output:
2024-11-19 13:39:33,636 INFO Downloading uboot from https://arm01.puri.sm/job/u-boot_builds/job/uboot_librem5_build/85/artifact/output/uboot-librem5/u-boot-librem5.imx
78%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ | 835584/1073880 [00:00<00:00, 7616431.45it/s]
Enter the flashing mode by holding volume-up button while turning the phone on.

        If it's not detected, follow these steps:
        - Ensure that the phone is powered off
        - Turn all Hardware-Kill-Switches off
        - Unplug the USB cable if connected
        - Remove battery
        - Hold volume-up button
        - Insert the USB-C cable (red light blinks, no green light)
        - Reinsert the battery (red and green lights constantly on, the script will continue)
        - Release volume-up button

Searching…
uuu (Universal Update Utility) for nxp imx chips – lib1.4.193

Success 0 Failure 1

5:1 3/ 5 [Bulk(R):LIBUSB_ERROR_NO_DEVICE ] FB: flash -raw2sparse all librem5r4.img
100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 1073880/1073880 [00:12<00:00, 7616431.45it/s]

2024-11-19 13:39:51,570 INFO Cleaning up.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/newuser/librem5-flash-image/./scripts/librem5-flash-image”, line 538, in
sys.exit(main())
File “/home/newuser/librem5-flash-image/./scripts/librem5-flash-image”, line 521, in main
flash_image(uuu_target, args.debug)
File “/home/newuser/librem5-flash-image/./scripts/librem5-flash-image”, line 351, in flash_image
subprocess.check_call([‘uuu’, uuu_target])
File “/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py”, line 369, in check_call
raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command ‘[‘uuu’, ‘./tmp_librem5-flash-image_vowd1mno/flash_librem5r4.lst’]’ returned non-zero exit status 255.

And the computer:
newuser@pop-os:~$ neofetch
///////////// newuser@pop-os
///////////////////// --------------
///////767//////////////// OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64
//////7676767676////////////// Host: HP ENVY dv6 Notebook PC 088B110000305910000620100
/////76767//7676767////////////// Kernel: 6.9.3-76060903-generic
/////767676///76767/////////////// Uptime: 3 mins
///////767676///76767.///7676/////// Packages: 1886 (dpkg)
/////////767676//76767///767676//////// Shell: bash 5.1.16
//////////76767676767////76767///////// Resolution: 1366x768
///////////76767676//////7676////////// DE: GNOME 42.9
////////////,7676,///////767/////////// WM: Mutter
/////////////*7676///////76//////////// WM Theme: Pop
///////////////7676//////////////////// Theme: Pop [GTK2/3]
///////////////7676///767//////////// Icons: Pop [GTK2/3]
//////////////////////'//////////// Terminal: gnome-terminal
//////.7676767676767676767,////// CPU: AMD A8-4500M APU (4) @ 1.900GHz
/////767676767676767676767///// GPU: AMD ATI Radeon HD 7640G
/////////////////////////// Memory: 1203MiB / 5392MiB
/////////////////////

[irvinewade]

I recommend that you follow the official documentation for the reflash procedure.

Are you successfully getting your Librem 5 into serial download mode? After you have done so, with the Librem 5 plugged into your host computer, use the lsusb command on the host computer to look at the Librem 5 and see how it displays to the host. You should see something like

ID 1fc9:012b NXP Semiconductors i.MX 8M Dual/8M QuadLite/8M Quad Serial Downloader

The important bit is “serial downloader”. Don’t even worry about running the reflash script until you can get the above output.

You should also make sure that you have the latest version of the reflash script. Conversely, have you ever previously successfully reflashed?

[Sharon]

@irvinewade

I recommend that you follow the official documentation for the reflash procedure.

Dare I say, that in the ‘reflash’ procedure under Flash the Image that in my case, after diging out all the missing stuff required that we were trying flash Byzantium on to a Amber version. Too, I used @FranklyFlawless approach by using a USB stick instead of running off a PureOS desktop, or laptop.
~s