Author Topic: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives  (Read 75935 times)

Tiderfish

  • Calf
  • *
  • Posts: 9
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #60 on: September 12, 2020, 05:06:11 PM »
AHA! Did some googleing, and came across another poor soul having a similar issue. His solution was to edit the LSUpdater.ini file and add a couple of flags. When I went in there, I noticed the listed devices were wrong, because I brought this INI with the working LSUpdater.exe from the other download. So I deleted the bad INI, and imported the good one from the correct firmware download. Then I added the same flags he did. At last it would find the device. However when pressing the button to update the firmware, it said something like no partition firmware update aborted. So I changed the noformat option to 0 and it started loading the firmware!... for about 5 minutes, then I got an error that the uImage.buffalo file was missing. So I copied that into the same dir, and it wouldn't resume. Now I the updater program is having problems finding the unit again.

Here are the flags I used
Edit LSUpdater.ini
[Flags]
VersionCheck = 0
NoFormatting = 1 (changed this to 0 to let it format the partitions)

[SpecialFlags]
Debug=1

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #61 on: September 12, 2020, 07:35:24 PM »
Which debug options did you use?

Tiderfish

  • Calf
  • *
  • Posts: 9
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #62 on: September 12, 2020, 09:12:56 PM »
WE GOT IT WORKING!!!

I think part of my problem is my Intel Pro NIC on my laptop didn't like connecting and disconnecting to the nas and a switch all the time. So it was making the transition from TFTP on 192.168, to DHCP with the LSUpdater more of a challenge. My solution to this was to put in a small switch between the nas, and laptop, for the TFTP on 192.168, then plug in an uplink to it so the nas can get dhcp to be found on the network. This is of course with all the other steps in place like the modified INI file, and the commandeered lsupdater from another firmware.

Once it finally loaded, the web-gui page was all in Japanese! I was thinking I downloaded the wrong firmware. Luckily I was able to log in and change the default language.

Thanks again 1000001101000, or should I call you 'h'? I was looking for a challenge today, but I didn't think it would have gone THAT far!

PS. Now that I have it all configured I am playing around with adding it to my Active Directory, and running into some issues. Should I just start a new thread for that?

clippingxpert

  • Calf
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • Clipping Xpert
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #63 on: September 23, 2020, 01:07:02 AM »
Sweet. Blank drives is important, usually so is having enough drives

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #64 on: October 13, 2020, 10:05:31 PM »
I haven't looked to closely at the ls-wxl boot-loader but I assume it's similar to the others I've looked at.

On the devices I've looked at the bootrom appears to turn on the red led before starting the bootloader. The bootloader turns it back of early in the boot process around when it starts flashing the power led. If the bootloader fails to load the red led just stays on. I've actually confirmed this behavior by wiping the bootloader on an ls210 with an spi programmer.

So one possibility is that the bootloader got corrupted.

I've also heard of similar behavior when there is something wrong with the power supply, odd behavior happens if it can't provide enough power. You could try booting the device without drives and see if anything changes (most of the power goes to powering the drives).

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #65 on: October 13, 2020, 10:54:29 PM »
You could try re-flashing the chip with one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R5LPTYM

If the only problem is that the data on the chip got corrupted somehow that might fix it. I don’t know what the odds are of that but it’s something to try.

If you do decide to give it a try I can help with the procedure, I’ve done it several times testing other issues. Maybe if I get some time I’ll write up a wiki page about it.


1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #66 on: October 13, 2020, 11:24:54 PM »
I've been happy the programmer I bought (the one from the link). It's been pretty useful for how cheap it was.

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #67 on: October 25, 2020, 05:08:46 PM »
Start by disassembling the device. I have some notes about that from the LS-WVL which uses the same basic design:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Linkstation_LS-WVL#Disassembly

once you get the access to the main board you'll want to locate the 8-pin chip containing the bootloader. Usually they make the chip with a colored dot after they program it which make them easy to identify. On some models there is a small ~16k chip for the bootrom and in addition to the ~512K-1M bootloader chip.

see if you can dump the chip with the programmer. that could help confirm whether the chip is working or not.


1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #68 on: October 26, 2020, 10:33:38 PM »
Nice!

Take a look at the last 64K of the dump. You should see the bootlaoder environment variables there. After reflashing you'll want to set some of them again such as the MAC address and serial#

You can use this process to get the bootloader image:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Extract_Boot_Files_from_Stock_Firmware

it's usually in u-boot.img.

you can then try flashing it to the chip and see if that improves things. Depending on your software you may need to pad it with zeros to match the size of the chip.

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #69 on: October 28, 2020, 07:49:01 PM »
Nice!

would you be interested in writing up the procedure so I can add it to the wiki?

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #70 on: October 28, 2020, 10:18:57 PM »
Great!

Once you put that together I'll add some notes on how to use some linux console tools as well.

FrankC

  • Calf
  • *
  • Posts: 1
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #71 on: December 02, 2020, 06:53:02 PM »
Lee Macky
Thanks so much for this:

"changed my PC's IP and netmask to match--this was in the 169.254.0.0/16 range."

The tftp worked fine, but when I ran  LSUpdater.exe, I could not communicate with the LS410D until I changed my PC ip address to be in the range of the NAS.  It then rebooted and picked another IP address and I again had to change my PC to match.  But after all that, I was able to get into the web admin interface and set up the unit.

Thanks again

1000001101000

  • Debian Wizard
  • Big Bull
  • *****
  • Posts: 1128
  • There's no problem so bad you cannot make it worse
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #72 on: January 06, 2021, 10:30:57 AM »
Fantastic!

I'll add it to the wiki when I get a moment.

ukdiveboy

  • Calf
  • *
  • Posts: 2
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #73 on: April 21, 2021, 06:34:38 PM »
Hi,

I dropped my LS210D on the floor!  I replaced the harddrive with an "identical" Toshiba drive that I just bought.

I've followed all the steps in this thread to try fix the device.  I've gone through a few times to make sure I didn't miss anything.  I haven't been able to get the thing working.

I'm able to get the device to boot into EM mode, but after that is where I get stuck.  One of two things happen:
 - If I create just a single 1G ext3 partition (just like here: https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP) the unit never gets out of the E25 (firmware update) state.
 - If I create four partitions to try mirror the state of the original drive, I seems like I can recover the device, but then when I try configure the unit (through web interface) it refuses to format the user partition.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

One other thing.  I downloaded the latest LSUpdater, and for me it doesn't have a "Rebuild Partition Table" check-box.

« Last Edit: April 21, 2021, 06:51:10 PM by ukdiveboy »

oxygen8

  • The Oxy-genuine article
  • El Toro
  • ****
  • Posts: 417
  • Giving you some breathing space.
Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #74 on: April 23, 2021, 01:37:39 AM »
Start with partitionless disks with gpt.

My old german howto:
http://oxygen8.bplaced.net/E06.htm