unflashed prom/kill initrd and DSR6000 restored backup not booting

[sbourgeo]

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to this, but here goes anyway.

I have a disk running software version 3.5d that works perfectly in my DSR6000 with a flashed prom. The only non-stock things about the disk are it has the lba48 kernel and initrd is disabled. My question is, if I take this disk and put it in a DSR6000 that does not have a flashed prom, will it get beyond the "Welcome, powering up" screen with initrd disabled and a non-flashed prom?

[unitron]

Originally Posted by sbourgeo

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to this, but here goes anyway.

I have a disk running software version 3.5d that works perfectly in my DSR6000 with a flashed prom. The only non-stock things about the disk are it has the lba48 kernel and initrd is disabled. My question is, if I take this disk and put it in a DSR6000 that does not have a flashed prom, will it get beyond the "Welcome, powering up" screen with initrd disabled and a non-flashed prom?

I have no idea but suggest getting another drive with at least the same LBA number, if not higher, and "Xerox" ing the hacked drive to it, and use the copy for all of your experiementation.

[sbourgeo]

Unfortunately, that's tough to do because I am troubleshooting remotely for a non-technical person. After doing some reading, I'm pretty sure that no initrd + unflashed prom = no worky...

[royfernandez]

Originally Posted by sbourgeo

Unfortunately, that's tough to do because I am troubleshooting remotely for a non-technical person. After doing some reading, I'm pretty sure that no initrd + unflashed prom = no worky...

Yep, with initrd disabled, you aren't getting anywhere. Maybe you can clone the drive.

[mr.unnatural]

You can run the Turbonet install utility on the drive and I believe it will flash the EEPROM. You can download it from here.

[sbourgeo]

I was hoping to avoid having them flash their prom if possible, so I made a backup image of the original disk from cold storage with initrd enabled since the S1 kill_initrd binary won't work with the USB disk adapter they have. One thing I missed was that this disk did not have the lba48 kernel installed, which is a good thing in this case because I believe that using an unsigned lba48 kernel will also not boot if you haven't flashed your prom.

In the event this may help someone out, here's how I checked what kernel was installed when I pulled the original disk and booted the lba48 cdrom:

dd if=/dev/hdc6|strings|grep Linux

(Where hdc6 was the active kernel partition, hdc3 inactive in my case)

If you have a stock (signed) lba28 kernel, you should see output like this:

Linux version 2.1.24-TiVo-2.5 (build@buildmaster7) (gcc version 2.8.1) #1 Wed Apr 2 12:01:21 PDT 2008

If you have Todd Miller's (unsigned) lba48 kernel, you should see output like this:

Linux version 2.1.24-TiVo-2.5 (millert@inverness.columbia.ads.sparta.com) (gcc version 2.8.1) #9 Wed May 10 11:08:35 EDT 2006