Tank you glombus , now work , the problem was the the uImage , after the dd copy from /boot/uImage the pogoplug is resurrected whaaa.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('glombus', 'T')his post was originally going to be a plea for help, but after serveral days I FINALLY got this working on both my POGOPLUG PRO and POGO-P21.
Posting exactly what I did in case it helps anyone else.
Using a 160GB spindle SATA drive. No enclosure. Power coming from my desktop power supply (I'll get a better long term power source later). These instructions worked to get me a bootable environment on both the PRO and P21. The .nopci worked for both devices even though my PRO has a Mini PCI card.
The drive was sdf on my machine.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
#zero the drive
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf
#confirm /dev/sdf has no partitions
sync && fdisk -l
#Download the tarball and verify md5sum. b09ce58f93c79164c9dae0d62758be6c
#extract to a directory of my choosing on my desktop
tar -xzvf oxnas_sata_boot.tgz
#update disk_create
sed -i 's;#disk=/dev/sdX;disk=/dev/sdf;g' disk_create
#update sym link
ln -sf uImages/uImage.nopci uImage
./disk_create
')
gnu dd 8.21 does
NOT throw an error on my machine
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
#I see "Building a new DOS disklabel..." after running this
fdisk -c=dos /dev/sdf
n
p
1
2048
+10M
#Then I make another partition starting at 22529 (the first one ends at 22528) that takes up the remainder of the disk
#write changes to disk
w
#re-run disk create
./disk_create
#format and label
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf2 && tune2fs -L "rootfs" /dev/sdf2
#mount, install rootfs, create mac_addr
mount /dev/sdf2 /mnt/random && cd /mnt/random && wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-oxnas-latest.tar.gz && tar -xzvf ArchLinuxARM-oxnas-latest.tar.gz && echo "00:25:31:02:B7:8A" > /mnt/random/usr/local/mac_addr
#change dir, sync, unmount
cd / && sync && umount /mnt/random
')
Then I unplug the SATA cable connecting the drive to my desktop, plug in the SATA cable connecting the device to my P21, and boot up the P21.
I see the LED flash, I can hear the hard drive churn, and after about 8 seconds the LED goes dead. I don't see it getting a DHCP lease. However, I can see the NIC LED flashing. It's alive, but unable to communicate.
I pulled the power on the P21 and mounted the drive again on my desktop
So *this* is what finally got it working it seems.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
mount /dev/sdf2 /mnt/random
dd if=/mnt/random/boot/uImage.nopci of=/dev/sdf1 bs=512
sync
umount /mnt/random
')
Re-connected it to the P21. Booted. Worked. (yay)
The same drive boots on the Pro too. I haven't tested anything beyond booting and being able to SSH in, but for now, that's all I care about anyway.
Thanks Warhead and everyone for your instructions, time, and comments on this thread. I would never have gotten this going otherwise.