Debian Squeeze/Wheezy on Ultra 2?

Hello, i'm a total newbie.
I bought a new RN516 and want to install clean wheezy but there are some problems for me to make it boot from my usb-Stick.
First - There is no Backup-Button on the RN516.
The Serial Port – can i connect it with the gipo pins from my raspberry pi? If its possible - which data should i send to the ReadyNas? (Send data to RXD)

What i tried before was – change the boot-order in bios. Did not work.

If you download the logs and extract the zip contents what is the BIOS version in bios_ver.log ?

hello, thanks for your answer. My bios_version is 4.6.5 .

Oops what is the date of your BIOS.

my bios date is 06/06/2013 ReadyNAS-516 V1.0! is there a update for my bios?

mdgm wrote:
If you wipe the Internal flash you would need to make use of USB Boot Recovery to restore it but the EEPROM data would be lost. Without the EEPROM data RAIDiator x86 4.2.x won't work.

Is there a way to restore the EEPROM data from another (same) model?
I have an Ultra 2 which is 'untouched' (meaning running RAIDiator 4.2.21) and an Ultra 2 which is heavily touched (first tried Readynas OS6 on that one but did not have faith in btrfs, later on ran Debian Wheezy on it).
Somewhere in the process, I think the EEPROM data on the last one got lost, after a OS reinstall and a factore reset I only get the Readynas template on the admin page (so no model is shown). Also in RAIDar no model is shown, but (which seems strange to me) during the factory reset "ReadyNas Ultra 2" was shown.
Re-installing from usb (4.2.24) dit not help...

I'd like to know whether I can extract the EEPROM data from the existing untouched Readynas Ultra 2 to fix the 'Wheezy Ultra 2'. If it can't be done, no problem, I plan on keep running Wheezy on it. But I'm just curious whether it can be done.
Maybe something like dd if=/location/of/eeprom of=/eeprom/backup and vice versa?

Thanks in advance, and a happy and healthy 2014 to all!

Just to be complete: thanks to great 'external' help my problem was fixed within half a day.
For anyone who likes to try: backup the internal flash first (not just the partition but the whole flash). dd if=/dev/<flashdev> of=/c/flash_backup.img and copy it to a safe location (outside your nas, on a usb stick or something like that) before you start.
And just to be sure: also backup the VPD file that resides on the internal flash (also to a loaction outside your nas).

I ended up installing Wheezy on a separate harddisk while maintaining the integrity of RAIDiator.

I added a new item the the boot menu

label WheezyNas
kernel vmlinuz.64
append initrd=initrd64.img root=/dev/sda1 console=ttyS0

and copied the Wheezy kernel and initrd to the internal flash (renamed them to get an 8.3 filename, don't know whether that's necessary or not).

Then, by using the boot menu, I selected the new label which to my surprise was supported by the bios with it's own LED combo (both drive LEDs were used for the new label) and booted into Wheezy.
After confirming all worked, I changed the default bootlabel to 'WheezyNas'.

I now have a semi-dualboot system that boots Wheezy by default but when I want RAIDiator back, I can change the disks and just boot into RAIDiator (and change the default boot label back to 'Normal' if I want to keep RAIDiator).

The only thing missing in Wheezy is the drive activity LEDs.

/edit
^^^ which make me wonder whether there is any documentation 'somewhere' regarding the way the drive LEDs are controlled by RAIDiator or ReadynasOS... :roll:

IcyK wrote:
The only thing missing in Wheezy is the drive activity LEDs. /edit ^^^ which make me wonder whether there is any documentation 'somewhere' regarding the way the drive LEDs are controlled by RAIDiator or ReadynasOS... :roll:

Maybe try contacting http://natisbad.org/, he has done a lot of work on getting Linux upstream support for the ReadyNAS hardware, to get away from NETGEAR proprietary drivers.

Hi,
Following this discussion I have some quick questions about the Ultra 2 BIOS that I'm hoping someone can answer.
I know the BIOS first tries to boot from the internal 128MB stick. Failing that, will it proceed to try any of the internal hard drives? And if so, can it boot from GPT disks?

I'm asking because I currently have to have the USB drive mounted in order to update the kernel or tweak the initramfs. I would like to boot from /boot on (one of) the drives, or failing that I'd like to bootstrap and then pull an evil smile on that internal stick. But the logical first thing to try is to have the bootloader outside of the USB drive, hence my questions.
Thanks!

As far as I know (which is a substantial disclaimer ;) ) the BIOS cannot 'by itself' boot from a harddrive. Booting off of the internal flash is hard wired in the BIOS.