trying to reanimate bricked Dockstar

My situation is as followed:

i am by no means an expert on this field, so bear with me, if i sound a little confusing here and there :-)

I have 2 Dockstars here. One (a) did run Debian for quite some time (~2years), until i bricked it by updating it and not restarting it correctly (i guess), so the Dockstar did not boot completely (cannot verify this, cause on this one i changed the led-functions a bit). The other one (b) was laying around for some time, i experimented a little bit with it, but had no luck with some USB-Sticks i had laying around, so i decided to have it as a backup.
It seems it's time has come.

At first i tried to connect my jtag with Dockstar a) and i succeeded to get all the messages. It did boot into uboot, but there were checksum errors. I followed some links on how to solve that problem, but that seemed to be way over my head :-) so i gave up to follow this route.
then i tried to let it boot into debian from it's stick, but it never reached networking status. i tried to nmap it but no luck.
i then connected it again via serial/jtag and made my self a little comfortable with the pre-boot or uboot environment.
i finally found the ipaddress it gave itself with the help of this incredible forum and some other links / sites i found. but other than that i did not find out.

so i thought to myself: why not give dockstar b) a chance, at least that's what i decided once it was meant for.

but since it seems to have the same illness like a) - not showing up on my routers network, i connected it directly to my desktop - via jtag and network - and tried to find out what it did on it's booting-process.
So far i can say: it boots fine into pogoplug system, but fails to unknow reason to get an ip-address on my home network. i can ssh into it on it's 169.* address. so i though: i should bridge the network from my desktop to the dockstar, so i can at least install debian (or try to) on another stick.
but even that fails:

# Starting debootstrap installation
E: unrecognized or invalid option --no-check-gpg
debootstrap failed.
See /tmp/debian/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for more information.

but there is no debootstrap.log. inside /tmp/debian there's only a "lost+found" folder.

if anyone has an idea, what i could do now, i'd be very happy if you could lead me on this way.
if you need more information, please ask, as i am definately not an expert,

See:

http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12006,12007#msg-12007

-syong

@michapixel:
Do have a backup copy of the previous working USB for device a? If you do, just plug it in. Does it still work? I don't see how upgrade and restarting, even incorrectly, will brick your device. If you don't have one, you probably should in the first place.
I think using JTAG is over kill. If you have access to the serial port, I think using UART booting is probably an easier approach. Although I have never tried that because there was no needs. Maybe I should try it one day. Good luck.

Edit: Sorry, UART booting won't work on Dockstar. Do you still have uboot working?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/27/2013 06:25PM by twinclouds.