Reinstall of POGO-B02

[sjwoo]

I've done just about everything I can do -- but I can't get my Pogo to come back. It's been working just fine for a year, but then I decided to make some changes and ended up mess up ALARM to a degree where it didn't come back. No big deal, as I don't have that many configurations (mainly used as a Samba server), so I thought I'd just start over with the latest tarball.

Using Mint Linux in VM, I formatted the flash drive in ext3. Extracted the tarball while in sudo su mode. As you can see from the screenshot, it's all root. I created the mac_addr file in /usr/local/mac_addr with my Pogo's MAC.

The green light flashes for 10-15 seconds, then it goes dark. I've tried different flash drives, no difference. Just for the hell of it, I used an old backup I had and extracted that to the same flash -- same thing.

What can I do at this point? There should be nothing wrong with the NAND or the boot, since I didn't touch it.

- Sung

[Socaltom]

Did you re-partition the drive? If so it needs to be a dos compatible table "o" in fdisk
What format is the device ext 2? or ext 3? What was the old drive format? if you set the env to look for ext 3 it needs to be ext3.
Tom

[sjwoo]

When I did this about a year ago, I followed the instructions to the letter. So I'm guessing I did have ext3, but I can't be sure as I did delete the partition entirely from the USB drive.

After doing things the fdisk way, I decided to use partitionmanager to create the partition. The "o" command in fdisk is to create the dos compatible table isn't there -- maybe this is why this isn't working?

[sjwoo]

Went back to using fdisk -- followed instructions to the letter. Same response with ext3 and ext2. I really don't understand what's going on. How can I find out what the uboot is looking for?

[sjwoo]

Something else I remembered -- when I first installed ALARM on this Pogo, I used a USB hard drive. I moved it from the HD to the flash drive at some point, but it looks like I have a clonezilla image of the hard drive:

Model: FUJITSU MHT2040AT (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 78140160s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 63s 14338047s 14337985s primary ext3

So it was definitely ext3.

I really am out of ideas at this point. fdisked, partitioned, and formatted to ext3. Same USB key as before. Used the latest tarball, everything as sudo su. Updated the mac_addr file. Is this thing bricked?

- Sung

[sjwoo]

I actually managed to get it working again by restoring the clonezilla image. I have no idea how I even have that image as a backup -- must've done it on a lark one day.

It is indeed ext3, and it had the "boot" flag enabled. I tried that, too, so I'm still not sure just why I can't start fresh with this box.

I know that there's a newer uBoot that lets you execute fw_printenv -- that command doesn't work on my Pogo, probably because it's an old one. How can I output the necessary parameters if I do want to start from scratch?

- Sung

[Socaltom]

Have you done this yet?
viewtopic.php?f=29&t=2453
Tom

[sjwoo]

I have not, but I'm afraid my Pogo is just too far old. I can't upgrade via pacman because of glibc:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
glibc: /lib exists in filesystem
glibc: /usr/bin/tzselect exists in filesystem
glibc: /usr/sbin/zdump exists in filesystem
glibc: /usr/sbin/zic exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

I know this is because lib has been rerouted to usr/lib, etc.

Here's a question for you -- if I want to blow away the existing install of Arch, can I just re-execute the initial shell script?

cd /tmp
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/oxnas/oxnas-install.sh
chmod 755 oxnas-install.sh
./oxnas-install.sh

Like I said, I don't care about losing my Samba configs. I have them saved anyway, so it's really no big deal.

- Sung

[sjwoo]

I'll tell you one thing -- I'm getting a Raspberry Pi tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to making life much easier. The Pogo has been a nice unit, but working with it when it goes wrong is just a nightmare.

- Sung

[Socaltom]

With the oxnas boards you would need to run the revert script, then do the reinstall.
Tom