nwsp2 lite - stock Seagate AF HD 2TB not booting correctly

[frenbu]

Hello everyone!

fvwd, Jocko
Thank you for your beautiful work! :applause :hail

It's been a couple of months that i'm fooling around with your custom fw and i managed to install it (v13.0) pretty easily on a WD 40GB HD.
However i can't get it working on the stock harddisk, which is a Seagate AF 2TB disk, formatted with msdos table and partitioned with fdisk using the aligned partition table suggested by Jocko in http://plugout.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1143.
First i encountered the problem described by galaberta in post http://plugout.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=950&start=30 but following the tip i can get the logical sectors to 512k by mounting the hd in a pc sata connector directly, so after completing the install-howto for v11 i was thinking i was almost close to solve my issues with the stock HD but.... when i power-on the nwsp2 it seems to boot, the hd gets accessed, the blue led blinks fine as during normal startup but when the led stabilizes nothing "works".

The lacie is not seen in the arp table of machines in my LAN and my dhcp server don't receive any request, the nas ethernet activity led blinks at regular intervals.
So i dismounted again the HD and tried to check the partitions again, sdb7 is mountable but i don't find any boot.log in the root of it, the nas isn't booting completely. So i tried to write on sdb6 the kernel with GPT support (assuming it will work fine also with msdos) but nothing happens, the sympthoms are exactly the same. Tried again from point-zero reformatting the disk and repeating the whole procedure but nothing changes. :scratch

Do have any idea about this issue? Is there an alternative kernel that i could try out?

Thanks in advance
Francesco

[fvdw]

so no red led blinking. That means the bootloader has recognized the HDD

Normally the blue led flickers fast directly after startup then it should flicker irregular with disk activity that should take at least 1 minute.

If the blue led only flickers fast when powering up for 5-10 seconds and then it most likely fails to load the kernel.

To define next steps, first question what kind of nwsp2 is it, a classic or lite ? second question how about your linux skills and o you have a pc running linux or do you have more then one nwsp2 ?

[frenbu]

To me seems a kernel load failure, blue led is blinking fast for approx the first 10 seconds and after the initial disk activity the led stabilizes, the HD spins costantly with no r/w activity, no red led.

my nwsp2 is a LITE version (i forgot to write it in the post body) and my linux skills will do the job, i have a pc on which i use grml linux to work on the Seagate HD via sata connector but no other nwsp2.

[fvdw]

I am at work now, I will come back to this this evening

[fvdw]

to start with which which program did you make the partition table ?

[frenbu]

i used fdisk to craft the partition table on the HD

real-time update: same issue with now the old 40GB disk perfectly working before yesterday evening... it won't boot right now.
yesterday to shut down the nas i issued the halt command via ssh, maybe that bricked something in the u-boot?

[fvdw]

mmm..that looks not so good, but the halt command cannot be the cause u-boot is not affected by that.
Which linux distribution do you run on your PC ?

Need to know to see which methods we have to get access to the nwsp2

[frenbu]

i use a laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 to ssh control the PC on which is physically sata connected the HD.
The "slave" PC is a x86 running grml linux, a debian based live-oriented distro which i use to boot machines via usb livepen and set ssh server active at boot... No monitor/mouse/keyboard on this machine, i access only via ssh to the shell and via scp to transfer the files for later write with dd.
Sorry for the messy setup :hammerhead

If i need to run something more specific/different or particular hardware just tell me and i'll get what we need to step further :thumbup

PS this weekend i should be a little busy to find troubleshooting time
however this banana is awesome! --> :bananadance

[fvdw]

do you have time this evening ?

we can use the laptop with ubuntu and put a program on it to access u-boot net console via the network
So both laptop and nwsp2 must be connected to the Lan, is that setup possible ?

[frenbu]

i was not at home, sorry :doh
the setup you describe can be settled in less than 10 minutes, on sunday evening i should find a couple of hours to try, in the meanwhile you can write here some of the istruction i need to follow if you cannot be online sunday evening