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seezee's avatar
seezee
Aspirant
Aug 29, 2018
Solved

Firmware update 4.1.16 (& my stupidity?) hosed NV+ v1 h3 SPARC. Stuck on boot, C drive empty.

NV+ v3 SPARC was OS 4.1.15 but now it's 4.1.16, used on an APPLE environment over Gigabit Ethernet.   I got an email this morning alerting me to the firmware update (why now? this update is month...
  • mdgm-ntgr's avatar
    Aug 29, 2018

    seezee wrote:

    Got really clever & moved the log directory to the C drive and symlinked to it from the OS partition.


    That's a bit too clever.

     

    seezee wrote:

     

    Starts up, hangs on "booting up."  I can SSH in and I see the C drive is now empty.  Output of 

    df -h

    is

    Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/hdc1             1.9G  414M  1.5G  21% /
    tmpfs                  16k     0   16k   0% /USB

    Since /c/var/log no longer exists, I delete the symlink and create a new empty /var/log directory. Reboot. Still hangs.

    So the data volume is no longer mounting.

     

    seezee wrote:

     

    Try a USB boot, with a copy of the firmware executable on a thumb drive. Display says "Index Error."

    Booting off USB is only for if the firmware on the internal flash is corrupt. From what you've posted there's every indication that that's not the problem, so attempting to do USB Boot Recovery is a complete waste of time.

    seezee wrote:

     

    Try booting into tech support mode. Start RAID, mount /sysroot/, there's a single log file but since I'm telnetted in I can't open it.

    You should still be able to use cat and you should be able to execute most simple binaries under /sysroot/bin, /sysroot/sbin etc.

    seezee wrote:

     

    I can see the symlinks to my shares in the root directory, but the shares appear to be gone. And of course, the durned thing won't finish booting anyway.

     

    Am I screwed? I'm afraid to do an OS reset because I've got 4 × 2TB drives & the original factory OS doesn't support big drives (1TB maximum).

    Make sure that there's nothing under /sysroot/c that may prevent the data volume from being mounted.

    An OS Re-install installs the firmware from the flash onto the disks. When you update the firmware it's updated on both the flash and the disks. So for most users the factory firmware won't be on the unit for long. Think of a factory reset as wiping all data, settings, everything, and doing a clean setup using the firmware currently on the internal flash like it would've been if your unit had shipped with that firmware. Similarly an OS Re-install will re-install the firmware currently on the internal flash onto the disks.

     

    There are some files to check to see if they were corrupted whilst the 2GB root volume was full.

     

    /etc/default/services

    /etc/network/interfaces

    /etc/frontview/samba/Shares.conf

     

    etc.

     

    An OS Re-install won't fix corruption in these config files.

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