[SOLVED] Fun times at Pogoplug Mobile UART High

[dasbub]

Hi all.

I hope I'm not asking a series of stupid questions, but I'd rather be yelled at than keep banging my head against the wall.

I have a Pogoplug Mobile with a usb stick running arch.

Somehow it was powered off uncleanly and when it rebooted I got the dreaded blinking green light and no SSH access.

I tried to use the "revert" method with a different usb stick, but the Pogoplug isn't polling any USB device.

I've hooked up a serial connection and I'm able to get to the ALARM>> prompt as long as there's nothing plugged into the USB port. If a USB device is plugged in, the serial console stops responding while trying to poll for USB devices. I've tried booting with nothing plugged in, then plugging a USB stick in and using "usb stop/usb start", but it still doesn't detect anything.

Any ideas?

[WarheadsSE]

Well, you already took the step to get the serial, and test.

You could try tftp'ing in a kernel and see if you can get it to boot. That might let you get a real feeling for the USB bus' health.

[dasbub]

Do you have a For Dummies guide to that?

I can configure the ethernet connection and I have Solarwinds up and running, but I don't know if there's a kernel image I can just use or if I have to compile a new one from source (which would be a first for me).

Thanks for responding.

[WarheadsSE]

You can use the one right from the rootfs tarball

[dasbub]

Okay, we have progress.

While I was preparing to boot the uImage from that tarball, I did a printenv just to see what sorts of things were set.

I found the "if usb is found, boot from usb; else boot from NAND" and the "if usb drive contains revert folder, boot from NAND next time and don't bother checking usb"...

The second part does a few things:

setenv mainlineLinux no
setenv arcNumber
setenv bootcmd run boot_nand
saveenv
reset

I manually entered each of those commands and Voila! It loaded the old Pogoplug software without complaint.

I'm not entirely sure what all of this means in terms of what happened, but I'm happy that I'm back to square one.

Thanks for the help!