Clay_JF2019  Freshman Member

Obviously there is some secret "code" stamped in firmware and/or on drives that makes NAS540 accept a set of drives as its own as well as the necessity of intact system partitions and mount points on data volume. If any ZyXEL NAS expert knows a simple way to trigger these processes to remount my drives and restore the…

Yeah I am really chicken about trying to write zeroes to all areas of disks except data volume and then creating a partition table to define the data volume partition. That would assure any hack or random error in system areas would not exist to cause problems again. Its also really easy to make a critical error in…

Finally got control of my NAS. The answer? I removed my data drives and replaced them with an uninitialized drive. If ever used before, the drive must be zeroed out -- by, for instance, "diskpart" & "clean all" at Windows command shell. With an uninitialized drive present (and only uninitialized drives), I could finally…

Beeper went off right away. And it got plenty hot. Not quite hot enough to take skin on contact. But hot enough to require instant finger removal -- probably in excess of 70C. Not a good long term operating temperature for most CPUs. Possible that design changed a little from when your NAS540 was made. But apparently good…

Got the serial TTL level converter. But got one big question after disassembling the NAS540 box to expose the main board and port. I noted that the metal drive enclosure also provided heatsink capability that is now removed. So do I need temporary heatsinks for CPU and that other chip while communing with Busybox via…

Mounted the NAS540 RAID5 drives under a Ubuntu server. Found 3 RAID partitions MD0, MD1, MD2. MD2 appears to be my ext4 DATA volume. MD1 is Linux swap formatted. Haven't looked deeply yet but the data volume appears intact. Is MD0 what you called the system volume? And is sysdisk.img what you were referring to as the…

Awesome and pretty complete answer on secure remount. Your verification that the RAID disks can be mounted using another Linux machine is a huge relief. I have dealt with RAID arrays were the manufacture insisted on stamping its brand into the process --- sometimes to the extent that loss of the hardware mention loss of…

Also NAS 540 runs an unmodified full version of BareBox? Just asking as a lot of embedded devices seem to customize basic distributions like this to save memory or alter features. Occasionally the altered software does not tell that features are not working because they have been removed -- just error or success completion…

Fixing this box will be delayed a couple weeks for USB to TTL 3.3V cable to arrive. But thinking about buying new NAS 540 to get drive back online then selling this box when firmware is working again. But is that worthwhile? Is there a wiki page etc for how to remount a RAID 5 (4 disk) array from a compromised system in a…

I will have to order a compatible TTL level converter. I guess that will give me some chance at seeing if its stable enough to recover. Point me to how to run memory and CPU diagnostic on hardware first. If hardware is bad then no point trying to get good flash. But definitely was NEVER flashing correctly. Never shut…

hardware-wise are we talking hooking to NAS540 USB port? Or popping off case and hooking to header on PCB? Either way is the software hook up VT-100 emulation or what?

Serial port hook up possible I think. Point me toward something detailed on hook up. But maybe I powered off in middle of flashing. How do I tell when flash process starts and ends? Many of the other devices I have flashed would automatically reboot at end of successful flash. So in this case with no button pressing…

Seem to have flashed something. Because NAS Starter no longer can probe NAS540 out. Not good. But assuming it can still be recovered. Is the uboot.bin really the same for NAS540 as NAS320? I can see how it might be. But I am looking for factors that might have caused bad flash. Ones that I can correct.

MD5sum was wrong. I had copied M5sum for whole firmware .zip. Applied new MD5sum for just the ras.bin firmware 639d3e791d222f65377a612cf0cb582c in this case. Retried. IDK if its different results or not. NAS starter seems unable to detect. But had some detection issues before. Possibly firmware download got corrupted Will…

Hmmm...It would be good to know if the reflash might have been successful but not a problem solver. Could a successful reflash leave a hostile configuration or addons in place with a disabled reset button? I have been making the assumption that the NAS540 will be reset as part of firmware flash. Or that reflash will at…