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Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

redpola
Aspirant

Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

So, I proudly announced to my friend how great my RN104 is. Literally as he watched it said "upgrade firmware?". I clicked yes. Foolish. Now it's hung on "booting".

 

I look for a fix and discover that I can create a USB recovery drive if I can run PC .exe files. I cannot.

 

How can I unbrick my new RN104 using my mac? I am a geek and understand how to use dd and manipulate filesystems.

Message 1 of 5

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siigna
NETGEAR Expert

Re: Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

Luckily it's pretty simple on the ARM based systems.

 

Grab the USB recovery tool from here.

Grab your firmware from here.

 

Use Disk Utility to format the USB drive.

1 partition, MS-DOS (FAT) format.

Make sure Master Boot Record is selected under Options.

 

Copy to the USB drive:

  1. The "initrd-recovery.gz" and "NTGR_USBBOOT_INFO.txt" files from the "Marvell" directory
  2. The "uImage-recovery" file from the "Marvell/RN104" directory.
  3. The firmware image.

When you're done the layout should look like so:

siigna@tatooine /Volumes/USBRECOVERY $ ls -al
total 134048
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 siigna  staff      4096 Nov  2 18:21 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 8 root    admin       272 Nov  2 18:21 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff         0 May 22  2013 NTGR_USBBOOT_INFO.txt
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff  63391744 Oct 27 11:49 ReadyNASOS-6.4.0-arm.img
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff   2048370 Nov 27  2014 initrd-recovery.gz
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff   3161676 Apr 25  2000 uImage-recovery

 

View solution in original post

Message 2 of 5

All Replies
siigna
NETGEAR Expert

Re: Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

Luckily it's pretty simple on the ARM based systems.

 

Grab the USB recovery tool from here.

Grab your firmware from here.

 

Use Disk Utility to format the USB drive.

1 partition, MS-DOS (FAT) format.

Make sure Master Boot Record is selected under Options.

 

Copy to the USB drive:

  1. The "initrd-recovery.gz" and "NTGR_USBBOOT_INFO.txt" files from the "Marvell" directory
  2. The "uImage-recovery" file from the "Marvell/RN104" directory.
  3. The firmware image.

When you're done the layout should look like so:

siigna@tatooine /Volumes/USBRECOVERY $ ls -al
total 134048
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 siigna  staff      4096 Nov  2 18:21 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 8 root    admin       272 Nov  2 18:21 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff         0 May 22  2013 NTGR_USBBOOT_INFO.txt
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff  63391744 Oct 27 11:49 ReadyNASOS-6.4.0-arm.img
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff   2048370 Nov 27  2014 initrd-recovery.gz
-rwxrwxrwx  1 siigna  staff   3161676 Apr 25  2000 uImage-recovery

 

Message 2 of 5
redpola
Aspirant

Re: Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

Thanks very much! I'm surprised this information isn't already in the knowledgebase.

Message 3 of 5
siigna
NETGEAR Expert

Re: Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

Message 4 of 5
redpola
Aspirant

Re: Mac OS X USB recovery drive?

Outstanding! I've employed many software engineers and it's always refreshing to find one with a clue. Nice one.

 

Addendum: For bonus points you need to integrate this knowledge into your tech support's resources- the response I got from them was "not possible" and "use a Windows machine". 🙂

Message 5 of 5
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