Have I bricked my DockStar by upgrading to Wheezy?

I have happily been running Squeeze on my DockStar for a couple of years. A couple of days ago I decided to upgrade to Wheezy (something I have done with other hardware on numerous occasions). The upgrade process went fine until I came to reboot.

Now my DockStar will not boot either with the disk attached or not. I moved the disk to another DockStar and it boots fine so I can only presume the upgrade process has damaged the bootloader although I have no idea how or why. When I turn it on, it pauses for a few seconds then the green LED flashes quickly for about a minute, after which the orange LED flashes quickly indefinitely. I have checked my DHCP server and no IP address is requested.

Is there anything I can do or has my DockStar sadly reached the point of no return?

The Dockstar can be recovered via JTAG worst case, so you can always recover if it's not a hardware issue, but it's probably an easier fix than that. More details would help. Do you have a serial cable?

http://web.archive.org/web/20101128031835/http://plugapps.com/index.php5?title=Hardware:_Seagate_DockStar_Reflashing
http://web.archive.org/web/20101128063147/http://plugapps.com/index.php5?title=Hardware:_Seagate_DockStar_uBoot_Restoration_via_JTAG

Have you upgraded your uBoot on the Dockstar that won't boot? The original uBoot featured on this site, U-Boot 2010.09 (Oct 23 2010 - 11:49:22), cannot boot the Wheezy 3.2 kernel. The one currently being offered here, U-Boot 2011.12 (Feb 20 2012 - 21:21:59) -- this one is for the Pogo Pink, so the build date might be slightly different for the Dockstar -- is needed to boot Wheezy (and it will also boot Squeeze).

lotus49,

Restamp is probably right! if your uBoot is too old, it won't boot Wheezy 3.2. Try this 3.11.1 rootfs (I patched this kernel so it will boot both old and new uBoot versions):
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,12096

If you can boot into this rootfs, you then can update your uBoot. And try your own wheezy roofts again.

-bodhi
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bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2013 12:46AM by bodhi.

Thank you all for your prompt replies.

Firstly, I do not have a serial cable, but I do have a CA42 cable that I bought with the intention of making one so I could if necessary.

I did install uBoot a long time ago so it probably is an old version but I have reason to doubt whether that is the problem. I have two DockStars although one is newer than the other so it is possible that they have two different versions of uBoot. However, when I swapped the disks round, my new Wheezy installation booted fine on my other DockStar but my old Squeeze installation would not boot on the DockStar I am having problems with.

Nevertheless, I would much prefer not to have to faff around with JTAG if I can avoid it so I'll try bodhi's rootfs and see how I get on with that.

Thank you all once again for your help.

Unfortunately, using bodhi's rootfs (which appeared to boot fine on my working DockStar) didn't boot.

I don't see how, but the Squeeze -> Wheezy upgrade process has clearly damaged something on the DockStar itself. It looks like it's JTAG time :-(.

Well, I was unduly pessimistic.

I built the serial cable using bits and pieces I have lying around (I have a lot of computer bits and pieces and I have rightly resisted my wife's efforts to get me to chuck them all out - I knew they would be useful some time) and having a serial port made a big difference.

It appears that my DockStar is booting. The first problem I had was that my DockStar was sitting in my DMZ so it couldn't see my DHCP server - doh. Once I had plugged it into my main switch, it booted fine without anything plugged in so I'm glad to say I shan't need to resort to JTAG.

When I plugged in the USB disk that had worked fine in my other DockStar, it couldn't load uimage but that seems only to be a disk issue. When I tried to boot the rootfs that bodhi had pointed me to, it worked fine now that the DockStar could see the DHCP server (although I couldn't actually log in as I didn't know the root password).

So, the long and the short of it is that something odd did happen that prevented my DockStar booting my new installation of Wheezy but my DockStar is not bricked and all I have to do now is sort out the installation issues (which I should be perfectly capable of doing on my own) and I shall be home and dry.

Thank you all for your support.

lotus49,

> tried to boot the rootfs that bodhi had pointed me
> to, it worked fine now that the DockStar could see
> the DHCP server (although I couldn't actually log
> in as I didn't know the root password).

Congrats! Glad you got it figured out. The root password for this rootfs is root.

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)

I now have everything working and I think I know what my problem was so, in case this happens to anyone else...

What appears to have happened is that my two DockStars were running different versions of uBoot. Upgrading to Wheezy with a 3.2 kernel meant that the old uBoot couldn't boot it but the newer one could.

The reason the older DockStar didn't boot with the disk from the newer DockStar was a coincidence due to a bad flash disk. When I removed all the drives, my older DockStar was booting but I couldn't tell until I built and plugged in a serial cable because it wasn't getting an IP address as I had forgotten to move it from my DMZ (where of course there is no DHCP server) while I was trying to reinstall Debian.

I still had quite a few hoops to jump through. I had to install Jeff's rescue system as the stock one didn't like Jeff's Wheezy install script. To do this I had to boot from a USB drive so I had to install bodhi's rootfs on a USB drive and I still had to edit Jeff's Wheezy installation script (to remove the --no-check-gpg option) as well as deleting the existing /usr/sbin/debootstrap so that it didn't barf on perl.

Thanks for your help and to Jeff also for having made it possible in the first place.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2013 07:44PM by lotus49.