Reviving a near-bricked Pinebook Pro

Posted on Sun 05 October 2025 in hints-and-kinks • 2 min read

Recently, I put my Pinebook Pro in something of a zombie state. This was by no means the hardware’s fault, nor that of the Armbian system I run on it. Rather, I put a bad bootloader image into the SPI flash (/dev/mtd0), which upon reboot put the laptop in permanent Maskrom mode.

It took me a little while to figure this out, because from the outside Maskrom mode looks remarkably like the machine is dead: when you hit the power button, nothing appears to happen. The power LED doesn’t come on (not even in red), the display stays dark. And the PBP being a fanless device, there’s obviously no fan spin-up either.

What I needed to do instead was find another machine, and connect it (via a USB A-to-C cable) to the PBP’s USB-C port. Then I powered on the PBP. If the PBP is in fact not dead, but in Maskrom mode, the kernel log (on the good machine) will show a message like this:

$ journalctl -b --grep 2207
Oct 05 09:30:43 foobar kernel: usb 1-6: New USB device found, idVendor=2207, idProduct=330c, bcdDevice= 1.00

I was also able to use rkdeveloptool (on the good machine) to talk to the device:

$ rkdeveloptool ld
DevNo=1 Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x330c,LocationID=106    Maskrom

Once able to access the PBP in Maskrom mode, I was nearly back in business. I now needed to follow the instructions for writing to the SPI from another machine in the Pinebook Pro wiki.

Now, I’ve found that zeroing the SPI (which should mean that the PBP boot process just ignores the SPI, and attempts to find a boot loader on the eMMC, and then on the MicroSD card) didn’t change anything for me — the PBP just kept coming back into Maskrom mode after resetting or power-cycling.

Thus, I chucked Tow-Boot into the SPI. At the time of writing, that was version 2023.07-007, downloaded from its GitHub release page.

I also had to obtain the rk3399_loader_spinor binary from the recommended source (at the time of writing, that’s https://dl.radxa.com/rockpi4/images/loader/spi/rk3399_loader_spinor_v1.15.114.bin per the wiki).

Thus, the whole process amounted to:

  1. Enumerating the device with rkdeveloptool ld
  2. Applying the bootloader
  3. Writing the Tow-Boot.spi.bin file
  4. Checking
  5. Rebooting the device

Here is the corresponding sequence of commands.

$ rkdeveloptool ld
DevNo=1 Vid=0x2207,Pid=0x330c,LocationID=106    Maskrom
$ rkdeveloptool db rk3399_loader_spinor_v1.15.114.bin
Downloading bootloader succeeded.
$ rkdeveloptool wl 0 towboot/pine64-pinebookPro-2023.07-007/binaries/Tow-Boot.spi.bin
Write LBA from file (100%)
$ rkdeveloptool td
Test Device OK.
$ rkdeveloptool rd
Reset Device OK

After this, the power LED immediately came on and the PBP happily booted Tow-Boot, which then enabled me to select the boot device and boot from either the eMMC or MicroSD card.

Pinebook Pro