I have been testing the Arch U-Boot build
2015.04.R1-27 on the ZyXEL NSA325 v2.
Instead of flashing (yet), I have used the UART recovery boot option to upload the U-Boot image to the device. Similarly, instead of installing Arch for real (yet), my Arch rootfs (from
the latest Arch Kirkwood rootfs tarball) has been residing on a USB flash drive formatted to ext4. This arrangement has allowed me to keep the stock software fully functional and intact during testing.
The test setup seems to work fine. You guys have all done a really great job giving these little devices a new lease of life and fresh versions of the kernel and software packages, kudos for that!
Edit: I was initially having problems with getting the flash partitions in writable mode, but it turned out I was simply using the wrong MTD device name in the "mtdparts" command line option - "nand_mtd" from stock, which is wrong for this kernel, as it expects "orion_nand", instead. Using the correct identifier and explicitly redefining the partitions made them writable.
Edit 2: I have now successfully flashed the above-mentioned U-Boot version over the stock. The next step will be partitioning the HDDs and setting up Arch for real. Will probably do that some time tomorrow. Thanks again. I was very disappointed in the stock software, but things are starting to look much better now.