Unable to run MrChromebox's firmware utility script - error mounting boot partition

[iucharbius]

I just picked up a yaviks Chromebook with an i3-N305 CPU. I’d like very much to put Ubuntu on it.

In my research, it seems that yaviks is a rare newer Chromebook where CR50 sets the WP state to follow the battery sense line - source - so I disconnected the battery.

I tried to run MrChromebox’s firmware utility script and got the following:

MrChromebox Firmware Utility Script starting up
Downloading supporting files...
Downloading required tools...
mount: /tmp/boot: can't read superblock on /dev/sda12
               dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.
Error mounting boot partition; cannot proceed
Unable to download cvfstool utility; cannot continue

I did a bit of research, and found a couple of topics, an old one from Reddit that I would link if I could include more than two links in a post, and a newer one on GitHub - here - so I created a recovery media and ran the recovery process, but it did not solve the issue.

I re-ran the recovery process, and it again did not solve the issue.

I checked fdisk (sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda) and saw a few interesting things:

Device            Start        End          Sectors    Size     Type
/dev/sda12   34304    50687     16384        64M     EFI System

Partition 6 does not start on physical sector boundary
Partition 7 does not start on physical sector boundary
Partition 9 does not start on physical sector boundary
Partition 10 does not start on physical sector boundary
Partition table entries are not in disk order.

There are details on the other partitions, but I only included sda12.

So, I’m at a loss. I suppose it’s possible that I did not perform recovery correctly, though I honestly doubt it. Any ideas?

Thanks!

[JoeM143]

I had the same problem when running the script after doing CR50 - and now that I think about it that could be why I can’t recognize the drive after manually flashing rom (via SuzyQ /w flashrom) externally.

@MrChromebox - YAVIKS is using UFS instead of eMMC and is showing up as sda12 (erroring out on the script)

On the coreboot side - i was able to get CBMEM from a windows live bootable:

[INFO ] PCI 12.7, PIN C, using IRQ #22

and

[INFO ] PCI: Static device PCI: 00:12.7 not found, disabling it.

see related post

[iucharbius]

I’ve just ordered a SuzyQ, Your reply is timely as it is supposed to arrive tomorrow.

It hasn’t occurred to me that UFS vs eMMC would make such a difference, but it makes sense.

[MrChromebox]

I don’t see how UFS would make a difference in mounting p12 under ChromeOS unless I have the internal storage prefix incorrect

[elly]

I don’t have any UFS devices to verify it, but according to CONFIG_SCSI_UFSHCD it should be detected as regular “SCSI” device, so /dev/sdX

[MrChromebox]

then I don’t know why it would fail to mount given the user above showing it is using the correct device + partition for mounting /boot/xyz

[elly]

Maybe Google had changed the partition layout or something along those lines?
Screenshot from cfdisk would help.

[iucharbius]

I can’t boot from an external drive yet, so I can’t run cfdisk (or even fdisk), but here’s what I see about the the sda12 partition in chrome://system…

[iucharbius]

And because I’m a new user, I can only put one embedded picture in per post, here’s the other section.

[elly]

You can run cfdisk in ChromeOS TTY. It ships with cfdisk binary by default

Although clearly they haven’t changed the partition scheme, p12 is supposed to be an EFI partition. Interesting.

[iucharbius]

I can’t figure out how to get cfdisk to run anywhere. I might need an ELI5 for it. In addition to the picture, I get a “-bash: cfdisk: command not found” in the terminal I get to with ctrl + alt + f2.

[JoeM143]

cfdisk from Fedora Live on ventoy
basically not seeing anything but the bootable USB device and two partitions within it