Please help! E02v2 Will not boot and I am at my wits end

[planeguy]

I am completely exasperated. I have spent at least 40+ hours trying to get my pogoplug set up. after many frustrating hours following the instructions the ended with reboot rather than poweroff I had it all set up and running LAMP, and reliably booting on cold boot. Then.....

I installed samba per http://blog.qnology.com/2013/03/tutoria ... linux.html
Would not boot

Suspecting that the PP could not boot due to multiple drives. I then followed the instructions here
http://mouhassan.wordpress.com/2012/06/ ... -usb-disk/
that was a bad idea....

Now unable to boot to Archlinux at all on any single drive. I found this thread
viewtopic.php?f=58&t=5963&start=10
found moonmans advice
[QUOTE=moonman]..It gives you kernel panic because your u-boot environment was modified and the kernel cannot find the rootfs.
It expects a rootfs partition to have a label "ROOTFS". For this to work you also need uinird because kernel can't read partition labels at boot by itself.

1. Create a bootable flashdrive (ext3)
2. Label it "ROOTFS" (all caps)
3. Download uinird from my uboot upgrade thread (look under goflex section)
4. Place in under boot directory on the flashdrive

This should work..[/QUOTE]

and followed moonmans instructions to go to this thread
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3355
and I followed these instructions
[QUOTE=moonman]Note: There are some reports that USB booting does not work while sata drive is in. So there are 2 ways to resolve this:
(Edit: try this first: the solution by mlitke)
1. Remove sata drive before (re)booting and insert it when system has booted up.
2. Create an initial ramdisk which will let you choose the root drive by label instead of /dev/sd[a,b,c,d]1 (the instructions below assume that you've removed the SATA drive and booted off of the flash drive that you will always boot from later)
(a) Download (or create your own) this uInitrd I created (it should survive kernel upgrades as I didn't include any kernel-specific modules in it):

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cd /boot
wget http://goo.gl/GFbtn -O uInitrd
It is also available here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/e6mwdz6bw3nxmjj/uInitrd in case my pogo is down.
(b)
Code: Select all
chmod 644 /boot/uInitrd
(c) change the default usb_set_bootargs to this:

Code: Select all
/usr/sbin/fw_setenv usb_set_bootargs 'setenv bootargs console=$console root=/dev/disk/by-label/urootfs rootdelay=$usb_rootdelay rootfstype=$usb_rootfstype $mtdparts $usb_custom_params'
Another Note: Your usb drive needs to have a label "urootfs" whcih can be done with "tune2fs -L urootfs /dev/sda1" while booted into archlinux without the sata drive. You may change it to whatever you want, but then be sure to change root=/dev/disk/by-label/urootfs to the name you want.
Another Note 2: If you are using the new systemd rootfs tarball then rootfs will be mounted read only unless you add an entry into fstab:

Code: Select all
LABEL=urootfs / ext3 rw,noatime 0 1
..[/QUOTE]

I hammered on this for 8hrs till 5am last night and I just cant get Arch to boot on a clean install anymore....I am concerned that I have something fouled up with the uboot settings.....Please help this newbie

[Socaltom]

Can you boot into the pogoplug prompt?

If so, can you get the uboot paramaters and post them up?

Is there any chance that when you followed the http://mouhassan.wordpress.com/2012/06/ ... -usb-disk/
That you fat-fingered it and put something other than ROOTFS as the label its supposed to look for?
Tom

[grayman4hire]

Sorry to hear you're having such a difficult time.

A few quick suggestions...

- You can run the uboot installation again. It will recognize that the uboot is already installed and ask if you want to reset it (select yes).

- Skip the "fw_setenv bootcmd" command during your next re-install.

- A "reboot" in the console is different from a hard reboot (unplug power). Try unplugging/replugging to see if it makes a difference.

- Since you're planning on running SAMBA, that implies you have a USB HD. Install ARCH on a small partition (4GB) on the USB HD and skip using the USB Flash Drive. This will avoid the multiple USB drive issue.

[planeguy]

Thanks for the suggestions! I just had to step away from this project for a few days and regain some sanity.

I started from scratch this weekend and re-installed u boot and everything went smoothly after that. However I have not reinstalled samba. There seems to be something in the instructions that fouls things up with the u boot config and then i am lost.

I really just wanted to install samba to use spare flash drives as file server locations, create backup of the os/server....etc.