Reinstalling Bubba TWO fails, what next?

[r.schreurs]

Some week ago, I could no longer access my Bubba over the network. I made it shut down and restart by pressing the button. The LED kept blinking at a 1 Hz rate, or so. I made several attempts to reboot is, but to no avail.

I decided to reinstall, following instruction in the manual

When powering on with the button pressed, the Bubba starts blinking at 2 Hz (I have carefully timed this), not at 4 Hz, some reading on the USB disc seems to take place, as its LED blinks a few times. Within about 10 seconds, USB traffic seems to stop. Ethernet traffic seems to continue. The Bubba's state does not appear to change in any way, not even overnight. The LED just keeps blinking at 2 Hz.

• I have used two different FAT32 formatted USB drives, not USB sticks.
• I have tried with the downloaded zip file extracted to C:\install as well as C:\, the manual does not make explicitly clear what must be done.
• I have added the file u-boot.bin, found in the download folder and tried again.

What should I do next?

[johannes]

Did you solve this yet? We do have known issues on some units where usb seems to need some love. Remove the uboot.bin-file (this is for another matter) and make sure you have a usb-stick with a partition table (such as the ones we supply) and the install image _unpacked_ to the root of the stick. Then retry, and if it still doesn't work, try another 5-10 times. Wait until you see some reads from USB (blinking USB light). Then a pause (a few seconds) then more reads, and then the fron LED steps up to 4 Hz. Now you are home safe.

[ryz]

A good way to know if the boot from USB works is to test it as an rescue system first if you can.

This is from the Bubba 2 Manual

Rescue system

It is possible to boot up your Bubba|Two from a USB stick without formatting your hard drive. This could be useful if you by mistake have "locked" yourself out from your Bubba|Two. In the '\install' catalogue you will find the 'bubba.cfg' file. Edit the settings in this file to fit your needs. Please notice that editing the config file in Windows with Notepad or Wordpad will destroy the file. Use an editor like Notepad2 or ConTEXT. If choosing 'rescue system' a SSH connection will be available at the WAN port. You will need to have an DHCP server as Bubba|Two in this mode will obtain an IP address automatically.



Important:

* You need a DHCP server as Bubba|Two in this mode will obtain an IP address automatically.
* Connect Bubba|Two WAN port to your DHCP server.
* A SSH connection will be available on the WAN port using username: 'root', password: 'excito'.
* After changing the 'bubba.cfg' file, follow the same procedure as the standard installation.
* If you do not know what you are doing, do not do it!

If you can connect through SSH you know that the USB boot works and that there has to be some other problem with the reinstall. I did this myself when I had problem to reinstall . I actually figured out all the commands that was run on an normal reinstall and made an bash script with these command so I could run the interactively from the ssh root shell. I then found out that I did get errors from the partitioning and formating of the hard drive. So it was my hard drive that was damaged with was not such a big surprise since my problem started after I accidentally dropped the Bubba from my windowsill.

I think it would be and good idea for Excito to add an interactive reinstall script that could be run from the rescue mode to help debug reinstall problems.