No LED. Dead?

Hi,

After a reboot, My Dockstar seems not to boot from the attached USB-Stick, seems not to boot without any USB-device attached, does not show up on my network an there is no activity on the front LED whatsoever. (There is power to the Dockstar's USB-Ports.)

What do you think? Completely dead? Probably reviveable by CA42 Cable/Serial Port?

I installed Dockstar Debian with the script a while ago and installed OSCam, hd-idle, NFS-Server, set it up with a static IP and installed a script to update the system time via ntp, all using this guide on the streamboard wiki (in German) (Translated with Google).
I had the Dockstar run an OSCam-server with an attached USB-card-reader and used a Seagate HDD with the NFS-fileserver for a few months without any major problems.
Two days ago the card reader reported some strange errors and I decided to reboot the Dockstar. Unfortunately, it did not show up on my network.

If the price for a new Dockstar were still at 20 Euros like when I bought it (It quadrupled since then), I would already have already bought a new one.

Thanks!

w.

Sounds like you need to check it with serial cable to determine what's things going on. A CA-42 cable costs less than $3 anyway on Ebay.

Your card likely has a corrupted filesystem. It's best to keep a backup image. While waiting for your CA42 cable, try this. It can't hurt... Boot up a computer with a linux live distro. It doesn't matter which. I prefer aptosid. But ubuntu will work just fine. Open a command window, and "sudo su -" to get root access.

Connect your usb card reader, wait a minute, then plug in your corrupt card (which I assume is your boot media.) Use "dmesg" to identify what "sd" device name your card was given. It should be at the very end of the output. Now, verify that it wasn't automounted with "mount | grep sdX" where X is whatever letter you identified earlier. If it was automounted, umount with "umount /dev/sdX".

If the device is unmounted, you can attempt to fix the filesystem with "fsck /dev/sdX". It'll tell you what's wrong and ask you to correct the issues as they are encountered. Just make sure you have the correct device and correct the problems. It's not going to get any worse given that it won't boot. But it may correct it.

Thanks for the reply.

The boot medium is a Sandisk 4-gig USB-stick. The Card reader in question is a smart-card-reader used with the OSCAM-server.
I already fsck-ed the Stick on my Linux desktop machine without it finding anything relevant. Also, the stick is happily booting in a replacement Dockstar on loan from a friend.

Since the pogoplug-System on my Dockstar won't boot (or at least the Dockstar does not show up on my network) with no LED activity whatsoever, I assume on of two things:

1. The bloody thing (or rather something important inside) is dead as a doornail.

(Although I haven't got the slightest idea what should have killed it as it was happily chuging along until this fateful reboot)

2. Something on the flash partitions got scrambled badly.

(For this, I ordered a CA-42)

w.