Setting Up GoFlex Net

[sambul13]

I just got a GoFlex Net dock, and since a new shiny USB Thumb for it is still on the way, wanted to boot it with the USB Thumb from Dockstar. But it doesn't... And apparently, neither boots from Pogo FS on NAND after upgrading its Uboot via Ubit procedure following the Guide here. It's not accessible over net either, just blinking its small eye . So I've a few questions:

- why GFN doesn't boot from stock Pogo rootfs similar to DockStar after upgrading its Uboot?
- why the above Guide suggests installing Jeff's Rescue System to the Thumb instead of NAND?
- how to install the Rescue System on NAND without erasing anything there, and is there enough free space?
- apart from Serial Cable use for original Pogo Uboot restore, what can be done now to get GFN back to work?
- how to edit the Dockstar's AcrhLinux Thumb to boot on GFN? Why it doesn't?

[bodhi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sambul13', '
')- apart from Serial Cable use for original Pogo Uboot restore, what can be done now to get GFN back to work?

[moonman]

Why it doesn't boot? Because you probably have kernel 3.5.x and Ubit does not support it.

[sambul13]

Thank you guys. Its a bit late to install latest Uboot at this point, first I do need to get this thing back to work. Having this in mind and following Varkey's advice, I unpacked this rootfs to an old 500Mb thumb, and its booted seemingly OK hooked to GFN. But the device is still not accessible on LAN. Any ideas why, and what to do next?

Also:

- if the latest Uboot is installed to GFN instead of Ubit, will it boot original Pogo FS from NAND, or Rescue System is still required as a replacement?
- I wonder, before developing the Rescue System, Jeff would need some idea why factory Pogo doesn't boot after Uboot upgrade - right?
- If I install latest Uboot to GFN now via Serial, what will happen with its own Uboot - now it's moved to a non-used NAND zone by Ubit?
- Generally, before new code is written to NAND, is old similar purpose code deleted from it (despite their size wouldn't match)?

[WarheadsSE]

This is one of those "Ask the Author" scenarios. We use Jeff Doozan's uboot/ubit but we don't make it.

forum.doozan.com

[sambul13]

Following Install ArcLinux on USB Thumb in a VM procedure by moonman, I reformatted my old flash and installed ArchLinux 3.1.10 onto it in a VM booted from Parted Magic ISO. Since the 500Mb flash drive was small enough, I copied the tarball to a different drive, unpacked it to the mounted Thumb (add -C [dir] at the end of tar command), then changed dir to the thumb's drive root and sync.

After that the Thumb was hooked to GFN and booted ArchLinux quite fast. But... when trying to update Uboot following local DockStar's Guide and the above hint from bodhi, Jeff's script installed all required utils onto the Thumb, and then spilled, referring probably to Ubit:

## Unknown uBoot detected on mtd0: 3044c8d21fa6a178c7def496dee9c768
##
## The installer could not detect the version of your current uBoot
## This may happen if you have installed a different uBoot on
## /dev/mtd0 or if you have bad blocks on /dev/mtd0
##
## If you have bad blocks on mtd0, you should not try to install uBoot.
##
## Installation canceled.

The advantage of that procedure was no Serial Cable and GFN disassembly needed. The questions now are:

- how to update from Ubit to the latest Uboot? That in turn would allow to update ArchLinux to the latest version, or hopefully simply restore my DockStar Thumbwith all apps to the GFN Thumb.
- do I need to change Arc number after installing Uboot to GFN, and what will happen if I don't?
- what are advantages & drawbacks of using Uboot with GFN instead of Ubit? Will Uboot allow to boot Arch from SATA?

EDIT: found this thread by moonman addressing the issues.

[pepedog]

So you found the no uBoot check?

[sambul13]

That did the trick. No joy though with booting original Pogo from GFN NAND with latest Uboot.

[sambul13]

Now I've got a new bigger thumb, and want to copy my Dockstar Thumb onto it to use it for booting GoFlexNet. I want to copy it inside a Linux VM on a Win7 PC. Before that I want to clean up the Dockstar thumb from old and uninstalled packages with pacman -Sc. So the questions are:

- is it possible to do inside the Linux VM rather than after booting plug from the thumb? Chroot Wiki say: "the architecture of the Linux environment you have booted into should match the architecture of the root directory " - why is that?

- once the thumb is copied, what do I need to adjust in the system on it to account for differences btw Dockstar and GFN? What's GFN acrNumber?

[moonman]

that means if you are on x86 machine then your chroot binaries need to be x86, x86_64 --> x86_64, arm --> arm
If you want it to get more complicated, you actually can chroot from x86 into arm, but you need a qemu-arm-user statically compiled binary. You don't need chroot for this though.

No need to change anything. Arcnumber is in uboot environment. According to jeff's script it is

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'elif [ "$UBOOT_PLATFORM" = "goflexnet" ]; then echo $FW_SETENV arcNumber 3089
')

Or https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUIL ... mach-types and search for "goflexnet"