How to Jumpdriver for beginners

[vitas76]

Using JumpDrive

Note: This only applies to the regular PinePhone, not the PinePhone Pro.

The internal eMMC flash storage can be flashed using the Jumpdrive utility by Danct12 and Martijn from postmarketOS. This utility boots from micro SD and exposes the internal eMMC flash storage when the PinePhone is connected to a computer. The process of flashing an OS to the exposed and mounted eMMC is identical to that of any other storage medium - e.g. a microSD card. You can use the dd command or a utility such as Etcher or Gnome Disks, etc.

Latest Jumpdrive can be found here

1. Check your /dev/xyz -> (sda or sdb) with lsblk

$ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,MODEL

2. Download and extract the Jumpdrive image

$ xz -dv pine64-pinephone.img.xz

3. Flash the Jumpdrive image to a microSD card

$ sudo dd if=pine64-pinephone.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

4. Boot the PinePhone from the Jumpdrive microSD card
5. Connect the PinePhone to your computer using USB-A -> USB-C cable
6. Check your /dev/xyz -> (sda or sdb) with lsblk

$ lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,MODEL

7. Download and extract the yours OS image

$ xz -dv yours_postmarketOS.img.xz

8. Flash the exposed PinePhone drive eMMC with your chosen OS image

$ sudo dd if=20251107-1008-postmarketOS-v25.06-phosh-25-pine64-pinephone.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress conv=fsync

9. Once the flashing process is complete, disconnect the PinePhone from your PC, power it down and remove the Jumpdrive microSD card
   The process is now finished, and you can boot from eMMC

The Jumpdrive image is smaller than 50MB. You can keep an microSD card specifically for using Jumpdrive, and there are 64MB microSD cards sold cheaply that will suffice. Jumpdrive also acts as a rescue image in case if you messed up your installation. To do so, you can telnet to 172.16.42.1, mount rootfs and fix it!

[vitas76]

"Maybe this will be useful for someone starting out."