Hello 1000001101000, thanks for your patience. Since gparted kept complaing that the last block on my old 2TB drive was wrong, I waited 'til a new 2TB drive arrived and I again had time to experiment.
The process I followed successfully with the small, 160 GB drive:
1) Connect Slacko USB stick and external USB HDD adaptor with 160GB drive to HP Elitebook.
2) Boot up Slacko
3) Use gparted to set partition type to gpt
4) Create one 1024MB partition, formatted ext3, leave the rest of the drive unallocated.
5) copy the two .buffalo files to that partition.
6) Shut down the laptop.
7) Put the drive in the NAS frame.
7) Reboot laptop in Windows 10 safe mode.
Make sure only ethernet is enabled and set to 192.168.11.1/24
9) Power up the NAS and wait for solid blue light.
10) Open NAS Navigator, allow it to change IP address to 192.168.11.150
11) Set lsupdater ini file to debug mode, no version check
12) run lsupdater. It finds NAS at 192.168.11.150
13) Call up debug mode window, check every box in the top half
14) Click update, wait for completion. lsupdater reports it cant find the NAS anymore. Close lsupdater.
15) refresh NAS navigator window. It reports NAS is now at 169.254..... and still in EM mode.
16) Change network adapter to 169.254.11.1/32
16) Open lsupdater.
17) set debug check boxes per the image in the guides you referenced earlier.
18) Click update. Firmware writes, updates, drive formats, NAS reboots and we now have a functioning (though small) NAS.
I tried the exact same process with new 2TB drive, an old 500GB drive borrowed from a friend, and the old 2TB drive that came with the NAS and the old 160GB drive, in that order. In the first three cases, I got only as far as step 8 above. When I power up the NAS it claims corrupt firmware by flashing E07.
I powered down the NAS sucessfully by turning off the switch, and pulled the 160GB drive so I could inspect the resulting partitions. There are six:
977MB ext3,
4.77GB ext 3,
384.5 KB977MB, 134.88 unknown type -- bios_grub
512B unknwon type
976 MB linux-swap
134.88GB xfs,
and 7.49 GB are unallocated.
I wonder what might happen if I clone this drive onto the 2TB drive, and then expand the xfs partition to the available space. What do you think?
Or, could it be that the NAS frame itself has something wrong with it and just won't recognize larger drives?
Thanks.