Bricked my kurobox

[john.abreau at zuken.com (John Abreau)]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Tom Metro wrote:
> John Abreau wrote:
>> The box came without a hard drive. I installed a new hard drive in it
>> initially, and it booted into its flash ROM. 
> 
> So what mechanism does it provide to interact with it when it is in this
> state with a raw drive? Telenet? Web UI?

It's a headless box. You power it on, wait for it to query the
DHCP server, then telnet to it. The flash ROM boots a 2.4 Linux kernel
in a tiny ramdisk with busybox, accessible via telnet and ftp.
The same conditions apply when booting from a hard drive; you wait
for the system to boot, then access it via telnet, ssh, or whatever.

There's no web interface; well, there probably is one in the tarball
image that came with the box, but it's not in the flash ROM, which the
wiki refers to as the Emergency Maintenance boot ROM.

The documentation sheet that comes with the unit is in Japanese;
there's no English, nor any other languages.

It comes with a cdrom with a tarball containing a Linux OS image,
and a Windows .EXE file that's apparently an installer. The unit has
no cdrom drive. The wiki has instructions for manually installing
the system, which involve ftp'ing the tarball to the box, then
telnetting to the box to untar the tarball.

There's a page on the wiki that talks about a JTAG debugging cable,
which adds a serial port to the unit. It looks like the case cannot be
reassembled when the cable is attached.


> Can you interact with it if the drive is disconnected? That would at
> least confirm that the Flash image is still functioning normally.


I didn't try that yet.


>> I was unable to load the supplied tarball...
> 
> Can you elaborate on that some more?
> 
> I take it it isn't designed to work like a typical turn-key
> Bring-Your-Own-Disk (BYOD) NAS box, where you just plug in a disk, and
> it either automatically, or via a UI operation, partitions and formats
> the disk?
> 
> Instead they have a portion of the OS on the hard drive and its up to
> the customer to load that onto the drive?

The entire OS is written to disk; the flash ROM is apparently used
only to install the OS to the hard drive, then it runs from the
hard drive exclusively.


> The right way, in my opinion, to build a small, low-power NAS box is to
> put the full OS into flash (given that you can get 4 GB cards for $50
> these days and a more modest 1 GB card for next to nothing, this is
> easily doable), and preferably use a removable CF card, which can be
> attached to any PC as an IDE drive using a low-cost adapter.
> 
> If the box can accept multiple IDE drives, you might want to consider
> using a CF adapter as described above, providing you can hack it to
> bypass booting from the internal flash.


The box is tiny, and there's not enough room to swap the IDE cable
for one with an additional connector on it.


>> I shouldn't need to overwrite the entire 250 GB. I would have
>> thought that 1024 bytes was sufficient, but I can certainly try
>> zeroing a larger amount. What would you suggest: 10K? 100K?
> 
> 10K is probably sufficient, but it'll only take seconds to zero the
> first megabyte, so might as well do that.
> 
>  -Tom
> 


- --
John Abreau
IT Manager
Zuken USA
238 Littleton Rd., Suite 100
Westford, MA 01886
T: 978-392-1777            F: 978-692-4725
M: 978-764-8934
E: John.Abreau at zuken.com  W: www.zuken.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFGNoetiof7R0HCNyURAu5wAJ95aBIhlPuUDXyMNulj/ubPR7y/ggCfS1Wb
U9NmfrvzB44QsC75uCPFm2U=
=aRXZ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.