Issue with eMMC

#1

Hi,

I have a Radxa 64GB eMMC in a Rock 5B and it ran continously as my home server (actively cooled at typical 30°C). Yesterday it stopped working and I got a boot error.

I took out the module and put it into an eMMC->USB3.1 adapter and plugged in into a PC. Both Windows and Linux recognize it as 5.42GB* unfromatted drive however I have a 64GB eMMC.
(*This is the recognized block device size and I cannot see any partition or partition table.)

Could you advise if this is a HW failure or something what I can fix by any SW magic?

Thanks in advance

#2

Just a quick follow up.

I installed Linux onto an microSD and booted with that while the eMMC was installed in the Rock5B.
The good news is that Rock5B can see the whole capacity (~57GB) but the bad news is that it is dead.

I tested with testdisk and it couldn’t find any partition even with the deep scan. It sees that the GPT backup table is corrupted. It continues with the primary but unable to list any partitions.
I gave up to save any data so I tried to delete the whole partition table and recreate it. Unfortunatelly, the partition table creation fails. Both parted and fdisk didn’t drop any error but the partitions are not created. There was no suspicious log in dmesg … actually nothing when I would save the new partition table.

So this is a HW failure after ~1 year with light usage.

I saw the chipset (foresee fseiasld-64g) supports FFU firmware update.
Does anyone know if this is something what I can do on my own (with the eMMC to USB adapter) or it requires another programmer board which connects more BGA pins?

#3

I had the same EMMC issue with Rock 5B

#4

@Rockpi_fan thanks for the feedback.

For me it looks it is dead after 3 months in operation and I bought a new one.
As a reference my chip was:FORESEE FSEIASLD-64G

The new eMMC has Samsung chip. I hope that will last longer.