WD MyCloud Gen2 (Glacier, Armada 375)

Man Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wonder if someone can help me. I'm about to go
> on an extended vacation and wanted a little nas
> with plex running with me, so I thought of
> bringing this thing with me. I have had the wdmcg2
> which I haven't touched since 2016. It's been
> running Debian jessie with Fox' 3.10 kernel, just
> a little samba server basically.
> I thought I might as well upgrade it to Trixie,
> and the original kernel worked fine up until
> Buster or something. After that I couldn't log in
> via SSH, so I put on John's 4.12.0 kernel and the
> it started working again and I managed to upgrade
> to Debian.
>
> Now, I saw that when upgrading the kernel using
> using Gparted from a live distro on my pc that
> sda2 and sd3 had switched places. So that the
> physical second partiton with the rootfs is
> actually sda3 and the third partiton is sda2
> (while sda1 is linux-swap). That bugged me, so
> after moving things around with gparted I got
> rootfs=sda3 into the actual third partiton and the
> sda2 to the second partition. Now it won't boot
> from either the second or third partiton?
I know where the fault is.
When I first installed Debian ages ago I blindly followed instructions from fox.exe. And ended up with sda3 as the 2nd physical partition and couldn’t understand why he would do that.

Well, it seems even though the bootloader is hard coded to boot from sda3, there is a limit on how «far» back it is on a drive. When I used a 500GB ssd, I had sda3/rootfs as the 3rd physical partition. Since my rootfs partition is 40GB and the first partition is a 1GB swap drive, with data partition in the middle as sda2, sda3 starts at (500GB - 40GB + 1GB) approx 461GB. This worked fine.
However on the 3TB original drive sda3/rootfs would start at 2961GB and that won’t boot. The solution was to (with a partition editor/manager) delete sda2, move sda3 to the left, right after sda1, then recreate sda2 partition after sda3. Mening that the physical layout on the disk is now [sda1/sda3/sda2]. And now it boots fine.

If you don’t want to mess around with illogical partition numbers vs actual physical placement on the disk, I presume the easiest is just to create a small dummy partition right at the start of the drive and have the data partition as sda4. (Assuming you’re using a seperate partition for data. Something like this [sda1/sda2/sda3/sda4] aka [dummy partition/swap/rootfs/data].

Man,

Stock u-boot has quite a bit of limitation.

I could try building a new u-boot for you and osa to overcome the limit of this box. But I need a volunteer who is interested in doing the testing.

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

This is not a dealbreaker, it was just to put out the information in case someone in the future had a similar problem.
Of course, if you want to try to build a a new uboot, I am sure I could help you test, and probably others will too.

@Man i would suggest swap / rootfs2 / rootfs / data. Since it's easy to swap between active root '/' and only '/boot' must be on sda3 or sda5. Out of order GPT partitions are not so bad idea as well.

nicefile Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> @Man i would suggest swap / rootfs2 / rootfs /
> data. Since it's easy to swap between active root
> '/' and only '/boot' must be on sda3 or sda5. Out
> of order GPT partitions are not so bad idea as
> well.
I don't know why one would need to have both rootfs and rootfs2?
For now I've settled on [dummy partition/swap/rootfs/data]. It works well for my Debian Trixie install, and is easy to replicate.

All,

I'm rolling a new u-boot for this box. Hopefully it will remove the shackle of not being able to save u-boot envs, and therefore have to self-impose a kernel size limitation of 5MB on SPI flash.

Please get these info.

Boot with serial console, interrupt u-boot countdown and,

printenv
help
bdinfo
md.l f1018000 8
md.l f1018100 1
md.l f1018140 1

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/01/2025 02:11AM by bodhi.

FYI,

The MVEBU kernel size is getting quite close to 5MB. I think the next kernel might not fit in the required flash space of 5MB for this box stock u-boot.

I've been trying to reconfigure this kernel at each version to keep the size down (just for this box), but there will be a time when that will not be possible.

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

Hi Bodhi,

I hope the attached info helps. I am quite new to this uboot stuff, but I am willing to test things if possible.

Cheers

neuro

neuro,

> I hope the attached info helps. I am quite new to
> this uboot stuff, but I am willing to test things
> if possible.

Very good info! Stay tune for my new u-boot upload. I've done everything else except for the registers dump you've just provided.

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

neuro,

Is your serial boot log looks like this (from osa)?

U-Boot 2013.01_v1.05 (Mar 31 2015 - 18:27:56) Marvell version: 2014_T2.0p3

Board: WD_Glacier_DB-88F6720-V2
SoC:   MV88F6720 Rev A0
       running 2 CPUs
CPU:   ARM Cortex A9 MPCore (Rev 1) LE
       CPU 0
       CPU    @ 800 [MHz]
       L2     @ 400 [MHz]
       TClock @ 200 [MHz]
       DDR    @ 534 [MHz]
       DDR 16Bit Width, FastPath Memory Access, DLB Enabled
DRAM:  512 MiB

Map:   Code:		0x1fed6000:0x1ff92d98
       BSS:		0x1ffefa20
       Stack:		0x1f9c5f20
       Heap:		0x1f9c6000:0x1fed6000

SF: Detected MX25L8006E with page size 64 KiB, total 1 MiB
PCI-e 0: Detected No Link.
PCI-e 1: Detected No Link.
SF: Detected MX25L8006E with page size 64 KiB, total 1 MiB
### Loading Firmware from USB 3.0 Disk ###
USB2.0 0: Host Mode
USB2.0 1: Device Mode
USB3.0 0: Host Mode
Board configuration detected:
	GE-PHY-0 on MAC0
SERDES configuration:
	Lane #0: PCIe0
	Lane #1: PCIe1
	Lane #2: SATA0
	Lane #3: USB3
Net:   egiga0 [PRIME]
*** ERROR: ping address not given
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0

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

Attached to this post is the new u-boot for this box.

uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.bodhi.tar

sha256:
08496db64e6a92945971ad54bf24677ff724976d2a10e215620c22325e77850f  uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.bodhi.tar
6d5b5773a53a7609e3bdb48e210f03d127cf57f96287cf4eba69bc4b7c2742db  uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.kwb

This tarball contains 4 files

uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.kwb
uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.boot.cmd
uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.boot.scr
README.txt

From another Linux box, connect serial console to this NAS, and use kwboot to load and run the kwb image.

kwboot -t -a -B 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 -b uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.kwb

Note: the serial device ttyUSB0 is typical for Debian-based distro. On other distro it might be different (see detailed kwboot example here).

======

Once you can start this u-boot, interrupt the countdown and

dm tree
usb start
usb info
sata init
sata info
setenv ipaddr <some valid IP address>
ping <your router IP address>
dm tree

Note: ipaddr must conform to the local network, for example, 192.168.0.100, if your router IP address is 192.168.0.1)

Please post the entire serial console log here.

To boot into Debian, a bit of setup on the rootfs is needed to adjust to new u-boot.

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2025 05:40PM by bodhi.

Hi Bodhi,

it looks similar to the one from osa. I have some Error messages, but I think they are created by missing storage.

See attached file.

Cheers

neuro

Hi Bodhi,

I please check the attached file with the tests.

After issuing "ping" it crashes and resets the device. I've retried it directly after kwboot u-boot with similar result.

My network is working - I've verified that with the stock u-boot.


neuro

neuro,

> I please check the attached file with the tests.

Cool! looks like USB and SATA are working.

Is the attached USB drive plugged in USB2 port or USB3 port? How many USB ports does this NAS have? and what type are they?

> After issuing "ping" it crashes and resets the
> device. I've retried it directly after kwboot
> u-boot with similar result.

Yes, the network error is due to U-Boot Armada 375 SoC implementation is way behind Linux. I'll need to add some code.

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



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2025 07:49PM by bodhi.

Here is the new build.

uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.bodhi.251123.tar

sha256:
ffe0d78687513477ed1f71b3d2d2b0a59553acdac2a62983c205d74ff1a1e345  uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.bodhi.251123.tar

This tarball contains 4 files

uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.kwb
uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.boot.cmd
uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.boot.scr
README.txt

Please do this test

dm tree
usb start
usb info
sata init
sata info
setenv ipaddr <some valid IP address>
ping <your router IP address>
mdio list
mii info
dm tree

And post the kwboot log. Include everything from kwboot command to the last output. There are important info in each phase. You can cut out most kwboot transfer progress to make the log cleaner.

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2025 07:48PM by bodhi.

Bodhi,

sorry for the delay, i was quite busy.

I have attache two files:

kwboot.log.1 --> crash after ping command
kwboot.log --> new attempt without the network part

I used this command to kwboot:

~/wd-hacking# kwboot -t -a -B 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 -b uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.kwb 2>&1 | tee kwboot.log

Shall I try to boot from harddisk or usb?

regards

neuro

neuro,

You don't really need to use | tee to capture the log. You could just copy/paste the log from the terminal. Here is a good kwboot log (using the DS116 u-boot as example). Note that we are seeing how kwboot prepared the payload here in the log.

kwboot -t -p -B 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 -b uboot.2024.04-tld-1.ds116.kwb

kwboot version 2024.04-rc4-00012-g417264db85-dirty
Detected kwbimage v1 with SPI boot signature
Patching image boot signature to UART
Aligning image header to Xmodem block size
Sending boot message. Please reboot the target...\
Sending boot image header (101120 bytes)...
  0 % [......................................................................]
  8 % [......................................................................]

 88 % [......................................................................]
 97 % [....................                                                  ]
Done

U-Boot SPL 2024.04-tld-1-07645-gb03b49046af-dirty (Apr 15 2024 - 12:24:29 -0700)
High speed PHY - Version: 2.0
Detected Device ID 6820
board SerDes lanes topology details:
 | Lane # | Speed |  Type       |
 --------------------------------
 |   0    |   0   | SGMII0	|
 |   1    |   6   | SATA0	|
 |   4    |   5   | USB3 HOST0	|
 |   5    |   5   | USB3 HOST1	|
 --------------------------------
High speed PHY - Ended Successfully
mv_ddr: 14.0.0 
DDR3 Training Sequence - Switching XBAR Window to FastPath Window
mv_ddr: completed successfully
Trying to boot from BOOTROM
Returning to BootROM (return address 0xffff05c4)...

Sending boot image data (500632 bytes)...
  0 % [......................................................................]
  1 % [......................................................................]

 96 % [......................................................................]
 98 % [..............................................................        ]
Done
Finishing transfer
[Type Ctrl-\ + c to quit]


U-Boot 2024.04-tld-1-07645-gb03b49046af-dirty (Apr 15 2024 - 12:24:29 -0700)
Synology DS116

SoC:   MV88F6820-A0 at 1866 MHz
DRAM:  1 GiB (933 MHz, 32-bit, ECC not enabled)
Core:  47 devices, 21 uclasses, devicetree: separate
MMC:   
Loading Environment from SPIFlash... SF: Detected mx25l6405d with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 8 MiB
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

Model: Synology DS116
Net:   
Warning: ethernet@70000 (eth0) using random MAC address - ea:bc:c9:8d:77:90
eth0: ethernet@70000
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
DS116>

And so on to the rest.

============================

> Shall I try to boot from harddisk or usb?

How many USB ports does this NAS have? and what type are they? are they all USB 3.0 ports or there is USB 2.0 port?

On another Linux host, create the rootfs Debian-6.6.2-mvebu-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 on USB thumb drive.

1. Since we are booting with the new u-boot, don't do Step 3 (3. Create uImage with DTB appended).

2 . Since we don't have an envs image yet, the envs are unpopulated. We need to boot with the script.

After you create the USB rootfs, copy the script from the u-boot tarball.

Assuming the USB rootfs is mounted at /media/sdb1 on the Linux host

cp -a uboot.2025.10-tld-1.wd-glacier.boot.scr /media/sdb1/boot/boot.scr
sync

Unmount and bring it back to the NAS. Run kwboot again and let it boot automatically.

Please post the entire serial console log here. If it is short, post it in code tags like the example with DS116 above. Or attach the log, fine either way.

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



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2025 06:13PM by bodhi.

Hi Bodhi,

this NAS box has one USB 3.0 port. I'll let you know when I have prepared the usb stick and proceeded somewhat further. There is a ton of information in that thread to read ;-)

Main Problem is that uboot crashed at the moment when i issue the "ping" command.

Have my logs been any helpful so far or shall I redo the whole thing?

-neuro

neuro,

> this NAS box has one USB 3.0 port. I'll let you
> know when I have prepared the usb stick and
> proceeded somewhat further. There is a ton of
> information in that thread to read ;-)

Only the 1st post is relevant! The first installation is simple

Quote

Note: If this is your first time installation, then you need rootfs Debian-6.6.2-mvebu-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 (this has kernel 6.6.2-mvebu-tld-1 already installed). Please scroll down to the 16 Dec 2021 section to install this rootfs. After you've booted the box with this rootfs, you can proceed to install the latest kernel.

After it's running then you can upgrade the kernel to the latest. The latest kernel is always up top. But there is no rush.

>
> Main Problem is that uboot crashed at the moment
> when i issue the "ping" command.

Don't worry about the u-boot network. We can come back to that later. As long as you have network in Debian, it's all that matter.

>
> Have my logs been any helpful so far or shall I
> redo the whole thing?
>

Yes it was very helpful! that's why I recomended to proceed to rootfs.

However, I would like you to do it one more time when you try to boot the rootfs. Confirm that a USB 3.0 drive is attached to that USB 3.0 port. This is a new capability (mainline u-boot for Armada 375 does not have this yet). So the command usb start below should spin up that USB 3.0 drive.

And in u-boot, run these commands:

dm tree
usb start
usb info
sata init
sata info
mdio list
mii info
dm tree

If mdio list and mii info crash the system, then repeat the test without these 2 commands.


And post the entire serial console log (from kwboot command to the last output).

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



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2025 09:16PM by bodhi.