Remix Mini PC: After a Year of Dead Ends, the eMMC Finally Talks

Source files: GitHub

For more than a year I have been chasing the same brick wall on the Remix Mini PC project: I could sideload a working Linux from an SD card, but the internal eMMC was a black box. Every attempt to read from it returned an I/O error. Every theory I tried — write-protect bits, NAND blacklists, hardware reset quirks, lockout states left behind by Android — went nowhere.

It turns out the cause was none of those things. It was one missing line in a device tree.

The setup recap

The Remix Mini PC is a 2015-vintage Android desktop box built around an Allwinner SoC (marketed as "H64", which is the same silicon as the much more common A64). Stock firmware was a locked Android variant that the manufacturer abandoned long ago. The project's goal: replace it with Armbian, permanently, on the internal eMMC.