Bricked my kurobox

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

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Tom Metro wrote:
> Kristian Hermansen wrote:
>> John Abreau wrote:
>>> I wiped the partition table by sticking the drive into a usb
>>> enclosure, checking /var/log/messages to find that it showed up
>>> as /dev/sdk,  and then
>>>
>>>    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdk bs=1024 count=1
>>>
>>> I then reassembled the kurobox, but it sill wouldn't boot into
>>> its flash ROM.
>>
>> Umm, didn't you wipe too much, unless your box is special?
> 
> He assumed the box was designed to automatically handle a raw drive. I'm
> not familiar enough with a kurobox to know if that's the case. Is it
> indeed sold without a drive and you just pop in a raw drive and it takes
> care of setting it up? If so, then it does sound like something has gone
> wrong with the flash drive. Though if you haven't attempted to do
> anything to the flash drive, it may still be an issue with the hard drive.
> 
> Are you sure you wiped enough? The command above suggests you only
> zeroed out the first 1024 bytes. I'd expect more to need to be cleared
> in order to overwrite the partition table. Trashing the MBR might not do
> much if the kurobox always boots from flash, and then loads a kernel
> from the hard drive.
> 
>  -Tom
> 

The box came without a hard drive. I installed a new hard drive in it
initially, and it booted into its flash ROM.  I was unable to load
the supplied tarball, and after fighting with that for an evening,
I tried installing gentoo, which worked fine initially.

Gentoo was giving me a bunch of dependency problems as I tried to
upgrade it, and in a moment of frustration I tried the tarball
that came with the kurobox again, figuring that in the worst case
I could zero out the partition table and start fresh. That's when
it turned into a brick.

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?


- --
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
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