Wiped Pioneer Box SD card

Pioneer Support
1

I accidentally wiped the SD card that came with my Pioneer Box. I used Etcher to try and restore the u-boot files to their original settings and it seems to have erased everything.

I’ve been having issues with my Pioneer box since I got it. I finally threw up my hands and decided to do a fresh install. The install on the hard drive is un-reachable now because the web interface cannot be reached. So I figured I needed to restart from scratch. But I had changed settings so it would go straight to the hard drive, hence why I was attempting to redo the u-boot files.

Step by step instructions please. I know just enough to get me in trouble.

2

I don’t really understand what you have been doing (you should not have to worry about u-boot).

Just take the file at https://ftp.freedombox.org/pub/freedombox/hardware/pioneer/stable/freedombox-stable_pioneer_a20-olinuxino-lime2-armhf.img.xz, uncompress it, put your microSD card in a writer/reader and write it to the microSD card.

If you have a GNU/Linux PC, it should be
unxz freedombox-stable_pioneer_a20-olinuxino-lime2-armhf.img.xz
and then
sudo dd if=freedombox-stable_pioneer_a20-olinuxino-lime2-armhf.img of=/dev/sdX where X in sdX is to be replaced by the letter under which your microSD card is seen (run lsblk before inserting the microSD card, and again after and see which /dev/sdX was newly added)

Then you can insert the microSD card in the Pioneer, connect the Pioneer to your routeur with a network cable (suggestion: try it first betwen your routeur and a computer, to make sure it works), plug the power and try accessing the web interface following suggestions at https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual#FreedomBox.2FManual.2FQuickStart.How_to_get_started in order to connect to the web interface from the local network.

3

I had changed root from the SD Card to the hard drive. So when the machine booted up it was going to the hard drive which had configuration problems. And I couldn’t re run the command to switch root back to the SD Card because the partition was too large.

4

I have a Pioneer with SSD on which I used ‘btrfs replace’ to move root to the SSD.

Whenever I have some problem, I boot on another microSD card that has a full Debian system installed and I run ‘btrfs check’ to fix any problem on the SSD. Then I also put the microSD card that has /boot in a reader on a computer and check the ext4 /boot file system.

When you said that you changed root from the SD card to the hard drive, did you do that via btrfs replace, or another way?

5

Via BTRFS replace.

But I some how got my SD card to work properly again. Thank you though.

6

Although this is concerning

PXL_20250520_210157049
PXL_20250520_2101570491920×2550 336 KB

7

It seems you have /boot on the HDD. I did setup my freedombox from the original freedombox image and ran btrfs replace, then I still have /boot on the microSD card. So you probably did something else in order to have /boot on the HDD. I assume that the HDD is more reliable than the microSD card, so your setup looks preferable as compared with mine.

I am not sure why you are concerned actually.

8

I thought the Pioneer box needed an SD Card to boot up with. Also can I move root to SDA2 and snapshots to something else?

9

Nevermind. Root is where it should be on the hard drive. I just need to move snapshots.

10

I was able to upgrade to Trixie by:

  • Updating the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
  • sudo apt update
  • sudo apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs
  • sudo apt full-upgrade
  • sudo reboot