Buffalo NAS-Central Forums

I noticed one issue with the power switch that may be of more general interest to others experimenting with (hacking) their Linkstation - including those who think they've "Bricked" their Linkstation.

I thought I'd "bricked" mine a few times when working on Debian, but managed to recover it after reading other posts and some experimentation: I didn't want the Linkstation to rebuild itself and avoided this, although taking out the hard disk so I could write to it directly has sometimes helped. My definition of a working Linkstation is that I can ping it and ssh to it (I'd previously setup ssh on the device). So here's the things that have helped me (the easiest are top of the list),

• After turning the on/off switch to "off" and shutting down your Linkstation ("shutdown -h now" if you've disabled the power switch function by installing e.g. Debian - note using blstools may fix this), wait for the Linkstation to turn off then turn off the power completely (remove plug) before turning on again. This is surprisingly effective to recover the device.
• If the above doesn't work, repeat once more.
• Change your network to 192.168.11.0, netmask 255.255.0.0; see if the Linkstation becomes visible, possibly on 192.168.11.150, possibly on another IP address in 192.168.11.x, esp. if using DHCP to automatically allocate IP addresses to your devices. Once you've got into your Linkstation this way you should be able to renumber back to your old IP address range, where the linkstation should remain 'visible' after a restart (including disconnecting the power as above).
• Copy the files hddrootmode, linkstation_release, rootfs_ok from the original Linkstation [from /etc] to /etc on the Linkstation. I'm not sure if all 3 of these files are needed (take out the hard disk and attach it to your PC to achieve this).
• (this one may be a red herring) Copy these same files to /boot - i.e. the /boot partition
• Note that hddrootmode & rootfs_ok are easily re-created, see below
• If all of the above fail you may need to start from scratch. I've not had to get to that point, but suggestions here (see posts elsewhere) include re-flashing the device and deleting [the contents of] the /boot partition, poss. also the root partition too to force the device into 'EM mode'. Note however that the firmware flasher utility (from Buffalo - lsupdater.exe when you download the firmware) has a 'debug' option that means you can select what things you choose to refresh - details here - setting
  Code:
  VersionCheck = 0
  ensures that the firmware updater will find your Linkstation even if it's running the same version of the firmware as the updater offers; adding
  Code:
  [SpecialFlags]
  Debug = 1
  enables the more selective debug option

On creating those 3 files for /etc and/or /boot previously mentioned:

hddrootmode is a null file, so:

rootfs_ok just contains a date, so:

linkstation_release contains some text re. the current installed firmware. Mine's on 1.56 and contains,