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| Friday, 06 February 2009 17:41 | |||
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7007 As you might know every firmware upgrade includes a certain risk of disabling your NAS. The same happened to me these days. When I was trying to upgrade the firmware using the webinterface nothing happened. The webinterface just jumped back to the starting point. As this happened twice I didn´t check the LED status to see if they were blinking and just rebooted the NAS. Big mistake! The NAS would not start anymore. Unlike the webinterface was showing the firmware upgrade process did actually start and I shut the box down during the process. So after a few hours searching and asking around I decided to set up this little guide on how to recover your NAS from this state. There are a few things you´ll need to recover your NAS.
We´re going to connect to the NAS using the serial port, access the bootloader menu and flash the firmware right there. Fortunately during firmware upgrade there is only the ramdisk of the NAS upgraded. The actual linux system running the ramdisk is not being touched. We´re starting with the data cable. Our cable needs to supply 3.3V. You might get a Nokia CA-42 data cable that is used to connect different Nokia mobile phones to the PC as described in here (german language). This cable is connected via USB to your PC so it needs some drivers to emulate a serial port. Another possibility is to use a serial cable like I did. I had some old data cable for an old Siemens S45 mobile phone that I didn´t need anymore. It´s a pretty cheap cable (about 4-5€ on ebay). It´s labelled S30880-S4501 A801-1. This website lists even a few more possible cables. Make sure you don´t get 5V power on your cable as it will permanently damage your NAS! First thing you need to do is cut off the phone connector. Be sure it´s not the PC connector, we´ll need that one. Instead of cutting the connector you can also try to break it open, mine was a 2-piece-connector I could break open. We need those lines:
Any other lines are not necessary. Isolate them. Now open your NAS. The board is located at the lower back end held by 4 screws. Remove the screws, unconnect the SATA, drive power and fan cables and carefully remove the board from the housing. The board still needs to be connected to the small board at the power button in the front.
The serial connector we need is the square with those 10 holes at the top right corner of the picture labelled J2. We need to connect our cable to some of those holes. You can do it the right way by soldering some connectors to your cable or you do it like I did and just try to do it as fast as possible. Connect the cable to your PCs serial port (COM1 or whatever you´ve got).
It´s not the best way but it worked for the time being. To find out where to connect your cable see this diagram.
Once you have your cable in place open the firmware archive and extract all files. You should have zImage, rd.gz and hddapp.gz. The file ImageInfo is not necessary. Next you need to start tftpd32. You can get it here. It doesn´t need to be installed, just start the executable file. Copy the 3 firmware files to the tftpd32 folder. Now connect your NAS with both the power and the network cable. Now we finally start PuTTy. Create a new serial connection and set baudrate 19200, data length 8 bit, no parity and 1 stop bit. Select no flow control. Power up your NAS and open the PuTTy connection. If your data cable works you should see the NAS booting. At the first boot my NAS stopped booting with a kernel panic. I waited a few minutes and as nothing happened I pressed the Reset button at the board. You might eventually do the same or even press the reboot button. Anyways, after a while you are prompted to interrupt the boot procedure by pressing CTRL-C. Do it. You are now presented a boot menu. At first you need to see what subnet the NAS is located at. Select the "Show IP adress" (or similar, just press 6). Your IP adress might probably be reset to 192.168.0.200. You need to configure your LAN connection at your PC accordingly to be at the same subnet. If you´re unsure what I´m talking about ask someone! We now will flash the firmware. Each flashing progress takes a few minutes and will be shown by some progress bar. Do not shut down the NAS during the process. The NAS will go back to the boot menu when it´s done. Hit Y, next 2, enter your PCs IP, press enter, type "zImage", press enter. Don´t type the " "! In case you want to delete whatever you enter use the cursor keys. The left cursor key will act like backspace. In case you deleted too much (yes, you actually can delete the screen messages...) and it won´t find the files at your ftp-server just reboot the NAS and continue flashing. You can reboot after flashing only one or two of all three files without problems. After flashing all 3 files press 1 to start the NAS or reboot manually (power off and on or press the reboot button at the back). Your NAS now should start without any problems again. You will need to setup everything though. All data on the harddrive(s) should remain intact, you just need to recreate your users, groups and shares.
Comments (8)
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you might wanna
yours is v1.0). The board looks about the same, but in the upper right corner
there are no 10 holes.. I have a nokia CA-42 right here, but I'm too scared for
trial and error, even though my NAS is a worthles piece of ****/brick right now.