Boot from lightening damaged Goflex Home

[smedius]

I had Arch linux running on a GoFlex Home, booting from a USB flash drive and using the Main Drive for Backups. We had a lightening strike and the system went down and would not reboot. Initially I thought the USB drive was bad, and I made a new ext2 rootfs drive using the Archlinux tarball. However I am unable to boot from the newly created root filesystem made after expanding ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-latest.tar.gz. I get stuck at the Marvell prompt on Netconsole. It seems the ubifs may also be damaged. It does seem to detect the hard drive. I am by no means an expert at booting from these devices or familar with the uboot envoirenment. Any help in booting and possibly recovering the device would be greatly appreciated.

Netconsole shows the following-

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'nc -lu 10.10.10.5 6666

U-Boot 2010.09 (Feb 16 2011 - 18:44:23)
UBIT v0.6 by Jeff Doozan and Peter Carmichael
(Re)start USB...
USB: Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus for storage devices... error in inquiry
0 Storage Device(s) found
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
UBIFS error (pid 0): ubifs_get_sb: cannot open "ubi:fast", error -19
Error reading superblock on volume 'ubi:fast'!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
** Block device usb 0 not supported
** Block device usb 0 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 1 not supported
** Block device usb 1 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 2 not supported
** Block device usb 2 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 3 not supported
** Block device usb 3 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **

Reset IDE: Bus 0: OK Bus 1: not available
Device 0: Model: ST2000DM001-9YN164 Firm: CC94 Ser#: Z1F019KM
Type: Hard Disk
Supports 48-bit addressing
Capacity: 1907729.0 MB = 1863.0 GB (-387938128 x 512)
Loading file "/boot/uImage" from ide device 0:1 (hda1)
** File not found /boot/uImage
Loading file "/uInitrd" from ide device 0:1 (hda1)
** File not found /uInitrd
reading /boot/uImage

** Unable to read "/boot/uImage" from ide 0:1 **
reading /uInitrd

** Unable to read "/uInitrd" from ide 0:1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
No Powersaving mode 7F
Error (no IRQ) dev 1 blk 0: status 0x7f
** Can't read from device 1 **

** Unable to use ide 1:1 for fatload **
No Powersaving mode 7F
Error (no IRQ) dev 1 blk 0: status 0x7f
** Can't read from device 1 **

** Unable to use ide 1:1 for fatload **
UBIFS error (pid 0): ubifs_get_sb: cannot open "ubi:ramdisk", error -19
Error reading superblock on volume 'ubi:ramdisk'!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
Marvell>>
')

Fortunately the main Backup drive data is intact!

[moonman]

When you made another rootfs on a different linux box, were you root? Sudo doesn't work. You either need to "su root", or if root account is locked, then you need "sudo su" before you extract. Seems your u-boot is fine though. To confirm at Marvell>> prompt issue "printenv". For your old drive you probably just need to check filesystem for errors on another linux machine (e2fsck)

[bodhi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smedius', 'I') had Arch linux running on a GoFlex Home, booting from a USB flash drive and using the Main Drive for Backups. We had a lightening strike and the system went down and would not reboot. Initially I thought the USB drive was bad, and I made a new ext2 rootfs drive using the Archlinux tarball. However I am unable to boot from the newly created root filesystem made after expanding ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-latest.tar.gz. I get stuck at the Marvell prompt on Netconsole. It seems the ubifs may also be damaged. It does seem to detect the hard drive. I am by no means an expert at booting from these devices or familar with the uboot envoirenment. Any help in booting and possibly recovering the device would be greatly appreciated.

Netconsole shows the following-

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'nc -lu 10.10.10.5 6666

U-Boot 2010.09 (Feb 16 2011 - 18:44:23)
UBIT v0.6 by Jeff Doozan and Peter Carmichael
(Re)start USB...
USB: Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus for storage devices... error in inquiry
0 Storage Device(s) found
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
UBIFS error (pid 0): ubifs_get_sb: cannot open "ubi:fast", error -19
Error reading superblock on volume 'ubi:fast'!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
** Block device usb 0 not supported
** Block device usb 0 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 1 not supported
** Block device usb 1 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 2 not supported
** Block device usb 2 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **
** Block device usb 3 not supported
** Block device usb 3 not supported

** Invalid boot device **

** Invalid boot device **

Reset IDE: Bus 0: OK Bus 1: not available
Device 0: Model: ST2000DM001-9YN164 Firm: CC94 Ser#: Z1F019KM
Type: Hard Disk
Supports 48-bit addressing
Capacity: 1907729.0 MB = 1863.0 GB (-387938128 x 512)
Loading file "/boot/uImage" from ide device 0:1 (hda1)
** File not found /boot/uImage
Loading file "/uInitrd" from ide device 0:1 (hda1)
** File not found /uInitrd
reading /boot/uImage

** Unable to read "/boot/uImage" from ide 0:1 **
reading /uInitrd

** Unable to read "/uInitrd" from ide 0:1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
No Powersaving mode 7F
Error (no IRQ) dev 1 blk 0: status 0x7f
** Can't read from device 1 **

** Unable to use ide 1:1 for fatload **
No Powersaving mode 7F
Error (no IRQ) dev 1 blk 0: status 0x7f
** Can't read from device 1 **

** Unable to use ide 1:1 for fatload **
UBIFS error (pid 0): ubifs_get_sb: cannot open "ubi:ramdisk", error -19
Error reading superblock on volume 'ubi:ramdisk'!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
Marvell>>
')

Fortunately the main Backup drive data is intact!

[smedius]

Thank you all for the help.

I did expand the tar file as root. I checked permissions and the files belonged to root.

However the advice got me thinking that I had formatted the drive using GUI tools, Disk Utility in Ubuntu. I checked with fdisk on the command line, the partition was not marked with the boot flag. After doing that the USB drive was detected by the firmware, the kernel was read, however the kernel did not boot completely into the rootfs with the following error, even though I had formatted the drive as ext3 in the GUI tool -

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '[ 33.602819] EXT4-fs (sda1): couldn't mount as ext3 due to feature incompatibilities')

This time I remade the entire USB drive again on the command line without GUI tools. However the GoFlex again did not detect the drive. Given the fact that I was able to boot at least once, I suspected that the USB drive ( though new ) was bad. I remade the rootfs on another USB drive on the command line, it now boots the device without problems.

Moral of the story

Do EVERYTHING on the command line
If one USB drive does not seem to work, try another make

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction and letting me know that there was nothing wrong with the initial uboot.

[moonman]

ext3 is actually a lot better because if there is an error in the filesystem, it will recover automatically for the most part. It seems though that you formatted your flash drive as ext4 which is definitely not supported.