Basics about NAND and eMMC flashing on BPI-R3 mini

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello everyone,

I'm on the way to change all my homenetwork routers to OpenWrt and I have to learn about from scratch. So please laught not too much but if so, only in private. :wink: Atm I'm playing with OpenWrt on a RPi to get a bit used to it.
It was quite difficult to find the right device for my usecase, but with the PBI-R3 mini, I think that I found a possible candidate. Maybe I will keep it as my main router in combination with a managed switch. If not, I will use it as a AP.
I did read allready a lot about this device and OpenWrt while I'm waiting for the device arrives.

Somehow I couldn't find a answer for the following real basic questions and hope someone can help me out.

  1. The device comes with a custom FW from Sinovoip, flashed on NAND and eMMC and I will begin with flashing OpenWrt(stable) to eMMC. After this was sucessfull I could flash NAND.
    What is the better flash memory to boot in general(daily) and which is the one to keep for backup?
    And if I break NAND or eMMC image. How would I recover it the easiest way? (U-Boot-writing from NAND to eMMC or vice versa?)

  2. The howto for flashing eMMC OpenWrt on this device has a option at its end. Point 5. If you like to have Ethernet support inside U-Boot... Can I write this directly after Point 3 the first time when writing the img to eMMC or do I have Point 4 to reboot first?
    https://openwrt.org/toh/sinovoip/bananapi_bpi_r3_mini

  3. Because I'm more used to Win, I did plan to flash the img from pendrive. Connected by ssh console on uart or usb. Will this be okay or is it more risky to endup with troubles?
    (I know, the mini is not the best device for beginners.)

  4. Is there something special I can do to prevent to happen what is discussed in following topic. https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/bpi-r3-mini-boot-from-nand-fails/17340

  5. If something unexpected happens while writhing the img to eMMC. How can I delete everything on the eMMC to start from scratch? Can I just write again a new GPT partition table?

Thanks for your attention, and I would appreciate, if someone could give me some answers. That's it for now, more questions will come up later.