Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Discussion about U-Boot and the kernel.

Re: Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Postby summers » Fri Nov 27, 2020 4:13 pm

Don't know how much difference there is between the NSA320 and NSA325 - but I purposefully didn't overwrite mine, in case I wanted to switch back to the stock OS.

So if interested I can give you the dump of my NSA325 partitions, and you could try those. Think the one most likely to be dodgy is the keystore - don't know what it is but sounds NSA325 specific ...
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Re: Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Postby psychokiller » Fri Nov 27, 2020 6:03 pm

Hi summers,
I suppose NSA325 would not work, but I actually have one untouched with NAND pristine with UBoot, env, rootfs and so on..
So i can make a dump myself and try, would not do any harm I think.
May I ask you any kind suggestion on the best way to dump everything from the NSA325?
One single large file?
Every partition on its own?
What to do before restoring? Have to set NAND partitions exactly the same with setenv?
Sorry for all these questions, but I don't feel like a true expert at using UBoot commands and MTDs partitioning.
Thanx for any help.
Paolo.
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Re: Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Postby summers » Sat Nov 28, 2020 10:15 am

Don't often play with the flash, only really when re flashing a fresh uboot. So I'm not really experienced.

Don't think it matters if you do one big partition, or many small ones - AFAIK these are just set up on the linux command line, but actually mean nothing to the flash, e.g. it doesn't have a partition table. Instead the partitions just run right on, one after the other with no gap.

What I would say is do use the standard flash commands, as these know the rules on writing to flash, e.g. which bits need to be cleared before writing. Flash isn't a standard file system, so can't write in standard way ...
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Re: Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Postby psychokiller » Tue Dec 08, 2020 7:06 pm

I managed to dump all the eight partitions from a pristine NSA325 and flash U-Boot to NSA320.
It worked and now NSA320 has a running bootloader, with probably a wrong environment.

I tried to apply the procedure described here ftp://ftp.zyxel.it/guide/nas/nsa320_recovery_firmware.pdf to restore kernel and rootfs using this package ftp://ftp.zyxel.it/guide/nas/nsa320_recovery_usb.zip as described many years ago here https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=6532#p36351 but sadly the kernel is loaded by U-Boot then it hangs...

I also ask myself why the WarheadsSE dump didn't work...

What might be the reason the Zyxel supplied kernel does not boot? Who knows....

Anyway I am still looking for dumps from a pristine NSA320, including whole nand, so to restore it in its exact conditions: if anyone has one....
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Re: Restoring stock UBoot on Zyxel NSA320

Postby summers » Tue Dec 08, 2020 7:53 pm

I can probably still access the old nsa325 evn variables, that had a method to switch back to stock. It may give a clue on what you need on the NSA320 ...
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