Force Recovery mode? NanoPi-R6S Diet with soldered-on eMMC failing

[suranyami]

I have a NanoPi6S, with an eMMC soldered to the board.

After successfully installing DietPi to it, and doing basic setup, I then proceeded to change the dietpi and root passwords (over SSH from my main machine), to strong passwords using my password manager (in this case, 1Password).

Somewhere along the way, I must have copied something else, I don’t know what, and managed to set root and dietpi with unknown passwords, possibly a path on the command line.

Probably serves me right for trying to do 2 things at once.

I’ve tried every possible password, including the ones in the password manager and the original dietpi, as well as anything related to what I was doing at the time… nothing.

I’ve tried re-installing the OS from both a micro-SD card with the official installer on it, and on an external USB, but it always boots into the eMMC-installed OS by default.

The next steps would normally be to reset the eMMC using the information here:

https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R6S#Linux.2FMac_Users

However, the process seems to NOT work at all.

Is there any way to force the initial boot up into a recovery mode? Some kind of Vulcan Nerve Pinch that will not continue on to the login screen, so I can change the root password to something sane?

[Joulinar]

@suranyami

Is there any way to force the initial boot up into a recovery mode?

We don’t have such a recovery mode. Does the device has a button where you can select boot order during power up?

[suranyami]

Well, the MASK button is supposed to put it in a mode where a USB-A to USB-A cable can be used to connect to it, but when I install and run the update_tools LD command it just says there is no device present.

So, is there no generic Linux/Debian way to force a Recovery Mode? That’s annoying. I guess I will need to grill the FriendlyElec forums for alternative solutions.

I just don’t understand why it’s not booting off the microSD any more! I’ve done that a number of times before to reinstall things, but now it’s just broken.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Joulinar]

I guess bootloader prefers eMMC over SD card. Usually you can clear eMMC, but this would require system access, which is not working in your case.