Bricked my kurobox

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

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?

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


> 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 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.


> 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

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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