Trying to use Jumpdrive: Possible eMMC defect

Hardware Librem 5
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My Librem 5 did not boot any more. The led stayed green. I had several times difficulties starting my Librem 5 lately, and now it does not boot anymore at all. The screen stays off.

So, I thought let me check if there is maybe a corruption in the file system or something else.

So I tried to use Jumpdrive to start the Librem 5 as a kind of USB storage.

I followed roughly these instructions.

The Librem 5 boots, the screen turns on (which did not happen when normally booting), and it shows:

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image1920×3413 585 KB

The small text states:
/dev/mmcblk0 could not be opened, possible eMMC defect

Could this be related to LUKS? Or could there be a hardware defect?

Any suggestion on how I could proceed?

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Ok, I retried the whole procedure, and now Jumpdrive is running.

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Also here Jumpdrive sometimes needs 2-3 starts for proper working

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May be a timing thing. If you want to investigate more … when you have that error can you telnet in from the host i.e. the network gadget works even if the disk gadget does not?

If you can telnet in then you could look more closely at the state of the eMMC drive?

And you could look at the state of the uSD drive if you have a uSD card installed in your phone.

You might also want to look at what version of Jumpdrive you have.

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I did not get the error any more. The file system on the boot partition of my Librem 5 was corrupted. I could see this when Jumpdrive did work well after the first attempt. In the end I reflashed my Librem 5, because it could not boot normally any more, even after letting fsck fix the file system. Great to have all this freedom and control over your device, freedom to investigate and repair! This is why I’m using FOSS. Librem 5 is totally fine up and running again, and tuned to my preferences again.

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I’ve found it needs a couple tries to work too. There were no filesystem errors as far as I’m aware.

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Also jumpdrive doesnt work well with all usb-c cables i have gotten error messages using a cable that wasnt supported

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The last upstream Jumpdrive release contains a very old kernel that sometimes needed more time to initialize eMMC than Jumpdrive scripts are giving it. The version in git had it already fixed for ages, but there was no release made since.

The solution is either to try again, or download it from sebastiankrzyszkowiak / Jumpdrive · GitLab which has updated binaries in its CI.

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