ChromeOS recovery ASUS C301

[Daniel Burke]

Hi i have been trying to recover the chromeOS using a usb and sd but it keeps failing. I had used Mrchromebox script to restore stock firmware and now it will not install the OS i have the recovery log. If someone could help that would be great thanks

[Vincent Palatin]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 5:25 AM 'Daniel Burke' via Chromium OS Development <chromiu...@chromium.org> wrote:

Hi i have been trying to recover the chromeOS using a usb and sd but it keeps failing. I had used Mrchromebox script to restore stock firmware and now it will not install the OS i have the recovery log. If someone could help that would be great thanks

Not sure exactly what is happening but it doesn't like the state of the eMMC:

I think it fails here:

This will install from '/dev/sda' to '/dev/mmcblk0'.
This will erase all data at this destination: /dev/mmcblk0
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
32768 bytes (33 kB, 32 KiB) copied, 46.0183 s, 0.7 kB/s
dd: /dev/mmcblk0: cannot seek: Invalid argument
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes copied, 0.000353113 s, 0.0 kB/s

It seems to erase the eMMC boot area? (as it is 32MB), not sure if this is intended or not (I thought we don't use it on those systems)

then fails on the next dd.

[Vincent Palatin]

my statement above might be unclear:

at this step, I think the write_gpt.sh script tries to wipe out the old GPT partition tables (by doing 2 'dd' of 32MB from /dev/zero )
here the first one (supposed to be the 32MB of the first GPT table) succeeded, the second one (supposed to be the last 32MB of the eMMC where the secondary partition resides) fails.

one possible cause I have seen long time ago was that the eMMC is actually pointing to its boot area rather than the user area (I think modern linux kernels has something in the eMMC driver ensuring this is not happening and the user area is selected properly)

or the eMMC is somehow broken.

[Vincent Palatin]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 1:10 PM Daniel Burke <dburke...@googlemail.com> wrote:

What  can i try next to get it to install or is they no hope

Any hint on what you did on this machine before trying to re-install Chrome OS ?

Did you install some kind of alternative bootloader on the eMMC ?

[Daniel Burke]

What  can i try next to get it to install or is they no hope

Thanks of the information 

[Daniel Burke]

Hi thanks of the info, is they anything i can do to try and get it to install or is they no hope 

thanks

[Daniel Burke]

hi 

 I had used Mrchromebox script to restore stock firmware. That is all i have done. Thanks