GoFlex Home fails to boot from hard drive after a while

[maihoaomv]

The problem I'm having is that everything will be working just fine. I can reboot, shut it down and power off the unit and it will boot without any problems but sometimes it won't boot back up at all. it never gets an ip address. Once this occurs it's dead. it'll boot ok from the rescue flash usb but not the hard drive. I can't do anything with it until I re-make the boot partition and tar the file system back on. this has happened probably 15 times. I tried reloading uboot in the NAND several times.

I tore down and rebuilt the partitions on the hard drive then reloaded the O/S, set it up, and for several days it worked perfectly until last night when I tried to reboot it from a cold start. and yes I used tune2fs -L "rootfs" to label the boot partition.

I looked at the logs in the /var/logs directory on the HD. The best I can tell the last log entry is for the last time that I shut it down. So I'm assuming that uboot is not seeing the hard drive for some reason (corruption maybe? i generally give it enough time to spin down the HD before removing power). I tried to use netcat but most of the time I can't get it to work.

I don't understand what is going on with it. Help!!!!!!!

[TheWalt]

There shouldn't be any file corruption if you are doing a proper shutdown and not just yanking power. Have you tried running e2fsck on the drive after it fails to boot to see if any errors are found?

[maihoaomv]

yes. it was clean

[Sagittarius]

I've installed alarm on a GFH for a friend.
It has the same very ennoying issue. Used to work perfectly. Then after an halt sent by ssh. It does not boot any more on sata.

[maihoaomv]

I think I may have found a problem on the GFH that causes it not to boot. The RTC (real time clock, aka "hardware clock") is failing to keep proper time.

My unit has a bad battery that is supposed to keep the hardware clock running when the unit is powered off. When first powered on the date is set to a date prior to the current date causing e2fsck to fail. Thus it would stop at single user asking for user input. You need a serial connection to the unit to see the problem.

A failing battery might explain the randomness of it not booting. Once I knew what the problem was and how to get around it I reinstalled a backup I had made of the OS after it refused to boot and for the most part it was working.

[Sagittarius]

Was a !hwclock sufficient in /etc/rc.conf DAEMONS line ?