It's interesting that violating guidelines succeed where technical problems fail in eliciting official responses. Even so, here is the only reference to posting links in the Forums' Terms of Service:
"You agree not to do any of the following actions while using Buffalo Technology discussion forums:
<snip>
(2) transmit via Buffalo Technology discussion forums any information, data, text, files, links, software, chat, communication or other materials ["Content"] that Buffalo Technology considers to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise objectionable;"
That was what I agreed to in order to join the forums. The forum guidelines are almost identical to the TOS, but do have one other item tacked onto the list of forbidden actions:
"(9) suggest or show how to make alterations or changes to firmware or hardware of Buffalo Technology products, use of DD-WRT, Tomato, or non-Buffalo-approved firmware (violates and terminates USA warranty of wireless products.), or provide links to non-Buffalo-approved firmware or hardware how-to articles."
That was such an afterthought that nobody even bothered to copy it over to the Terms of Service!
But even that's a stretch. I'm not suggesting alterations or changes to firmware; I'm suggesting restoration of firmware. Gaining telnet access to the file system is absolutely required to recover the Terastation in situations like mine. No other solutions posted on these boards worked despite following all instructions explicitly through multiple attempts. What is truly "harmful" is telling people their only recourse is to RMA their systems or redo partitions, losing data in the process. It is the opposite of "harmful" to document a way--so far as I know, the only way--that users can recover their systems and their data if they, too, suffer the consequences of a power outage and wind up with damaged file systems and arrays like I did.
If Buffalo tech support would actually provide solutions to E04 problems like mine, then guideline #9 would be defensible. But since many E04 errors have not been addressed successfully in this forum, it is simply not defensible to block user-supplied solutions that actually do work. Sheesh.