I can say the boot disk I wrote was to a Sandisk sd card, I've had the best luck with that brand. Samsung is the other brand I buy frequently and some work, while others do not. My Tow-Boot from SPI always boots the boot disk on my machine but initially it did not at all. I ended up installing through un-traditional means by booting my Arch SD (which has always booted for me) and downloading the slackware package-set onto a external usb drive and untarring the pkgtools package and then basically doing the install process myself. Since they are just scripts, I could run the "installpkg" script with the "--root" parameter and install the files on my nvme (which I had mounted and formatted myself prior). I installed the distro, ran netconfig and everything, setup fstab, etc. One could also use the "nbd" (network block device) program (I believe it's part of qemu) to mount drives on a networked machine as if they are local drives and install packages this way (this is how I achieved slackware on M1 Mac.) All in all, I've had much trouble getting the installer to run on anything, and I've found my ways around using it are more effective in the long run than attempting to make it work.

It seemed to take a few writes to get the bootdisk working, but once it did, I never had an issue with it. I'd suggest trying to write it on a few different machines, one of them will get it right. The pbp seems very picky about sd media and I don't have a sure-fire way to get it to work correctly, and even the people in pine64 chat don't really have any idea of what changed in the hardware, and why it's different nor what needs to be done to make things work... it seems a messy situation all around, sadly.

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jloco, thank you for replying.

"installing through un-traditional means" I'm looking into same, will post back if I get anywhere.

"even the people in pine64 chat don't really have any idea of what changed in the hardware, and why it's different nor what needs to be done to make things work...", digging around for ideas, I noticed this too.