RK3399 eMMC Boot

Few of high ended RK3399 SBC’s like Firefly and Orangepi vendor boards by default boot from eMMC and there is no way to boot from SD by means of any hardware jumpers or etc.

So, this document hack the boot mode programmatically erasing eMMC so-that the Rockchip BootROM will look for proper boot image in SD, assuming the SD card has valid boot image.

By default, the rockchip BootROM looking for IDB loader in eMMC at offsets {0, 512, 1024, 1536, 2048}KB + 32KB which are sectors 64, 1088, 2112, 3136, 4160

So zero to one byte on each above sector can by pass the ROM to look for another boot source.

So, boot the default board, which automatically boot from eMMC.

Better preserve existing eMMC data into disk, so it can help for future recovery.

$ dd if=/dev/block/mmcxxx of=orangepi-rk3399-emmc-default.img
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcxxx bs=1b seek=64 count=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcxxx bs=1b seek=1088 count=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcxxx bs=1b seek=2112 count=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcxxx bs=1b seek=3136 count=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcxxx bs=1b seek=4160 count=1