Re: Synology CS 407e: altboot fails to load installer.

[Frank Wille <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>]

On Wed, 11 May 2011 14:06:29 +0200
Oscar Molin <oscarmolin%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:

> I can get the install kernel image to boot, I can set up partitions on
> wd0 och such but I can't install since I can't move the install sets
> to the new partition.

Ok, this is a start!


> USB sticks are detected but can't be mounted.

Why? There is no reason it shouldn't work. What's the error message?

I'm not sure how familiar you are with NetBSD, so please forgive me the
following instructions:

1. When plugging in an USB stick, the kernel will print that a
   mass storage device had been attached (umassX at uhubY portZ etc.).

2. Shortly after that it will attach an SCSI device to it, e.g.:
   scsibus0 at umass0: 1 targets, 1 lun per target
   sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0 [...]

3. Now you can mount the MSDOS partition on it. You can check the
   disklabel which NetBSD generated for this device with "disklabel sd0".
   For some PPC ports sd0a will be the single MSDOS partition on a stick
   (I'm sure for macppc and ofppc). But it might be different for sandpoint
   - so just check the output.

4. Mount it: mount /dev/sd0a /mnt
   When there is an error message, repeat the mount command. (That's a
   small bug in some PPC ports I always wanted to fix.)

5. Access its files under the mount point (/mnt in this case).


> Secondary harddrisks can't be mounted so I can't get the install sets
> that way either.

I have never experimented with the external SATA interface, but a second
internal SATA disk should show up as wd1 and it should be possible to
mount MSDOS partitions on it, as shown above.

You can also create two MBR partitions on a single disk and use one
of them as an MSDOS partition, which you can write on any other system.
Refer to fdisk(8).


> Networking doesn't work either.

Really?? It's hard to believe that even the full kernel driver doesn't work!
But then it is no surprise that my minimal driver doesn't work either. :|

Are you sure the device is not defective? And the Linux SK98 driver
works fine? Then we should start comparing the driver sources...

This driver was imported from FreeBSD and OpenBSD 8 years ago.


> When I ping it claims that it's sending it but wireshark on my server
> doesn't see any packets at all.

Did you configure the device manually or via the installer? What did
you type? What did ping write? You should provide more information. :)


> I've even tried a liveboot cd with netbsd to be able to write the the
> disk with the ufs partition,

How did you do it? Did you connect a SATA DVD drive on the second SATA
port of your Synology?


> but I can't mount it because the
> superblock is claimed to be broken.

The default install kernel and generic kernel for sandpoint NAS does not
include the ISO9660 file system (because there is no NAS with a CD drive).
It would have to be recompiled.


> If I create a new ufs partition on my computer, and then put that
> harddrive in the synology as wd0, I can't mount that either for some
> reason.

Probably your other computer, if running NetBSD, is little endian. So
it creates a little endian UFS file system. PPC is big endian.

You can use the -B option of makefs(8) to set the endianess of the
filesystem. Refer to its man page. You may also need a kernel with
FFS Endian Independent support.


> Even if I got the installer to work, I still don't have networking so
> there isn't much of a point, unless I wan't to run a NAS with only one
> harddrive and networking over serial port.

Right. I'm quite shocked that even the sk(4) kernel driver did't work,
which was in use for so many years now.

-- 
Frank Wille