goFlex Home, can't get sata to work at all

So I've been through hell, and made it most of the way back in getting my GFH to work properly.

Here is a (semi-)quick rundown: followed Arch guide to get uboot installed but ended up with the wrong arcNumber set. Couldn't change any uboot environment variables because GFH requires the infamous 40ms patch that DavyGravy has been so kind enough to compile for people. Was stuck with the bad blocks problem in dmesg. Nabbed Davy's pre-patched 3.3.2 to my usb stick, but that still didn't work because I still had wrong arcNumber. Eventually found Davy's super special kernel package that applied the 40ms patch even when running off the default arcNumber (2087 or 2089 or something).....SUCCESS, this custom rolled kernel finally let me enable netconsole!!!!!!
Got netconsole working, logged into uboot itself, changed arcnumber, and nearly complete success....no more stupid bad block messages, and I can edit uboot environment variables form inside my debian install. Used the opportunity to run the latest uboot->mtd0 shell script with the --no-uboot-check (or whatever) option to make sure I indeed have the latest uboot...which I do.

Ok so here is where I'm at. I've got a usb stick with Davy's 3.3.2 kernel debian system on it. Pretty sure my uboot variables are defaults, except I added in basic netconsole, and properly set the arcNumber. uboot is the latest version 2012.04 I believe.

So I can boot off this stick all day, and if I want I can netconsole in and do almost anything. The ONE thing I can't seem to do is change my MAC address in uboot. If I do 'setenv ethaddr xxxxxxxx' either a) I immediately lose the connection b) it returns me to the prompt and then I immediately lose the connect.

That's problem 1. The more important problem that I have is that if I plug in my sata drive the device won't boot. netconsole shows uboot doing everything completely normal but something is going wrong with my debian install and it's not getting to the point of being pingable (let alone ssh-able). If I unplug my sata drive then everything works fine.

Kind of a big problem since my current goal for my GFH is to boot of usb stick, then share up whatever sata drive I choose to plug in (currently I am only using my 3tb seagate drive though). At some point I may end up booting from SATA but right now I'd like to get rescue on mtd setup as a backup, normally boot off usb, and then share up the files from my storage drive to my network.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm proud of myself for figuring out how to fix uboot, but I have no clue how to get SATA working!!

Here was a post I used after I got through the ordeal you are having (not the MAC address one, the booting one). Good luck.

Click Here

You can ignore my swap concerns at the end. I was/am still learning Linux.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2012 09:24PM by optim.

You can not boot USB with the presence of SATA driver via the default uboot environment initlized by uboot installation script. The default uboot setting (usb_scan_1=usb=0:1 dev=sda1) always attempt to consider usb stick as /dev/sda1 and pass it to kernel via root=xxx parameter. Unfortunately, SATA disk will be recogonized as /dev/sda1 by kernel while the usb stick will be /dev/sdb1, This will obviously cause a rootfs confusing as kernel will attempt to mount the first partition resident on SATA disk as root.

Indeed, You may need to boot the usb stick first without SATA driver, then plug the HD into SATA slot after booting or boot the usb stick interactively via uboot command-line.

Hope these info helps.

@floodo1,

Use the information about seting rootfs label and UBoot envs in optim's post (read a few posts before that). It's foolproof, you'll never worry about booting the wrong drive again! Besides, this rootfs label convention is used widely, good to follow it.

-bodhi

Many thanks to optim.
I took all the bootup sequence commands from his uboot environment, left out the parts about his nc server, and directing things to the serial connection (which I don't have...yet), and now I've got the thing successfully booting off of usb, with or without the sata drive plugged in.

But now I ran into a new bind....this one has no good solution though! Unlike most people I originally purchased a 3tb goflex usb3.0 drive, then found out about the goflex home, so I bought a GFH base off ebay. I figured this would make a SWEET setup, where I could use the GFH while I was at home, then swap the drive off the GFH and onto the usb3.0 base for travel purposes (i.e. travelling to friends houses). So while I was waiting for the GFH to show up from ebay I threw a couple hundred gigs of videos onto the 3tb drive which was formatted ntfs. Once I followed optim's advice and got my GFH working with SATA (3tb drive) working along side the usb stick I tried to mount the 3tb drive......errors about ntfs file system not being correct
....
long story short, the drive does not natively support advanced format 4k sectors, which means it uses 512 sectors itself. however the usb3.0 base masks the drive and reports 4k sectors to the OS when it is attached. This means that a drive cannot be used on both bases!!!!!!!!!!!

Guess I'm gonna have to just sacrifice usb3.0 and take the GFH with me on the road....or more likely, keep the 3tb drive on the GFH at all times, then use one of my other older drives for the road.....setup some script so that I can plug the road drive into the GFH via usb, have the script sync stuff over from the 3tb sata connected drive, and let me travel with a partial load....

oh well, still happy with the GFH, and super excited to customize this thing now that I've got a working uboot environment and current uboot/kernels :)

THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP!!!!!!!!!!
the info is out there, you just gotta dig through about 20 threads to piece it all together :)
Special thanks to optim and davygravy especially for making this possible for so many of us.

http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?pid=29469#p29469

now I'm wondering if I format it on the GFH, the swap it over to the usb3.0 base, will my 3TB ntfs partition still be readable, say on windows 7? seems unlikey, but I'm gonna have to give it a shot since I'm gonna repartition / format on the GFH tomorrow after I can find a temporary home for the files that are currently on the drive.