Looking for a little help with my Pogoplug Pro

[doctorjb]

Hi,

ArchLinuxARM has been working perfectly on my Pogoplug Pro for almost a year. Today, however, I was not able to SSH or SCP in; although SAMBA seemed to be working ok, Webadmin would not give me any other info except the System info ont he front page. So I thought I'd attempt a reboot but the Pogoplug just came up with the continuous flashing green light and could not be pinged.

I then ran fsck against the usb drive that the rootfs was installed on and there were a multitude of errors. After fsck had finished ArchLinuxARM could still not be booted. I then followed the instructions at the bottom of the install page to partition, format, extract the rootfs and create mac_addr to a new flash drive, but I'm still not able to boot the Pogoplug.

What are my options from here? Any help gratefully accepted and please bear in mind that I'm somewhat of a Linux novice.

Many thanks.

djb

[kmihelich]

Try using a different drive, especially if your current drive is just a usb flash drive.

[doctorjb]

Thanks for the suggestion but I've already tried 2 different USB flash drives. Any other pointers?

[kmihelich]

Just make sure you're creating the drives properly, that is usually where people mess up. Assuming when you plug the drive into another Linux computer that it shows up as /dev/sdb, become root (via 'su' or 'sudo su' on ubuntu) and then:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'fdisk /dev/sdb')
At the fdisk prompt, delete old partitions and create a new one:
Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.
Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.
Now type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, and then press ENTER, accepting default values.
Exit by typing w.

At this time it wouldn't hurt to unplug the drive, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in.

Then (still as root):
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
cd /tmp
mkdir plug
cd plug
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-oxnas-latest.tar.gz
tar -zxf ArchLinuxARM-oxnas-latest.tar.gz
cd ..
sync
umount plug')

When the drive stops blinking at your, plug it into the powered-off pogoplug, and then plug in the pogoplug.

[doctorjb]

Thanks once again. I've run those steps a number of times (as root) but no matter what, the green lights keeps flashing and I cannot SSH or ping to the plug.

[kmihelich]

You might try setting a static IP and see if that gets you anywhere.

Plug the drive back into your other Linux box, become root, mount the drive, and edit etc/rc.conf inside the drive. There are instructions/examples in that file for setting a static IP instead of the default DHCP.

[doctorjb]

Sorry I should have stated that I've already tried setting a static IP to no avail.

[doctorjb]

Well it looks like I'm back up and running. It took me 5 extractions of the rootfs! It seems that after extracting and creating the mac_addr I had to add a static IP to rc.conf BEFORE putting the drive intot he plug and booting. Once I could SSH in, I copied over the cloudengine files, updated packages and udev and now all seems fine.

Thanks very much for your help. I've now taken a backup of the entire drive just in case it ever happens again...