Re: Synology CS 407e: altboot fails to load installer.

[Oscar Molin <oscarmolin%gmail.com@localhost>]

>> USB sticks are detected but can't be mounted.
>
> Why? There is no reason it shouldn't work. What's the error message?
>
> I'm not sure how familiar you are with NetBSD, so please forgive me the
> following instructions:
>
> 1. When plugging in an USB stick, the kernel will print that a
>   mass storage device had been attached (umassX at uhubY portZ etc.).
>
> 2. Shortly after that it will attach an SCSI device to it, e.g.:
>   scsibus0 at umass0: 1 targets, 1 lun per target
>   sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0 [...]

I am unused to netbsd but I think there is some other problem here.
sd0 is indeed found when the kernel starts, however it's not available
under /dev/ at all and therefore can't be mounted or queried with
disklabel.



>> Secondary harddrisks can't be mounted so I can't get the install sets
>> that way either.
>
> I have never experimented with the external SATA interface, but a second
> internal SATA disk should show up as wd1 and it should be possible to
> mount MSDOS partitions on it, as shown above.

Just as with the USB disk, wd1 is found when the kernel starts but is
not under /dev/.


> You can also create two MBR partitions on a single disk and use one
> of them as an MSDOS partition, which you can write on any other system.
> Refer to fdisk(8).

This is news to me. I'll try to get this working


>> Networking doesn't work either.
>
> Really?? It's hard to believe that even the full kernel driver doesn't work!
> But then it is no surprise that my minimal driver doesn't work either. :|
>
> Are you sure the device is not defective? And the Linux SK98 driver
> works fine? Then we should start comparing the driver sources...
>
> This driver was imported from FreeBSD and OpenBSD 8 years ago.


There must be something else causing all this.
Maybe PPCboot loader initializes some periphials like wd1, sd0, sk and
such and leaves it in a state where the devices don't work?
I don't really feel like burning altboot to ROM quite yet to try
without it though.


>> When I ping it claims that it's sending it but wireshark on my server
>> doesn't see any packets at all.
>
> Did you configure the device manually or via the installer? What did
> you type? What did ping write? You should provide more information. :)

I'll look into this later


>> I've even tried a liveboot cd with netbsd to be able to write the the
>> disk with the ufs partition,
>
> How did you do it? Did you connect a SATA DVD drive on the second SATA
> port of your Synology?

I just hotswapped the harddrive to my workstation.



I'll send you a private email about setting up compiling environment