New installation does not work

[BadTicket]

After I long and stable time withe my B3 and a external HD as one drive, I choose to use the B3 alone again. So I shut the B3 down, take away the USB-HD and try to reinstall the firmware with the USB-Stick i bought from Excito. When I press the power button and plug the cable in, the light is green and changes after a short time to purple. As written in the manual. But then, I can wait for dozens of hours, but the light never changes to blue and I can't access the B3. I try that with an new formatted USB-Stick and the latest firmware too, but the same "effect"...
What is wrong here? What can I do now.?

Thanks for your kind help!

Heavenicetrip! Fe/2

[johannes]

Funny, it should not change to purple quickly, this probably means it cannot read the USB stick properly. Purple means it has exited the installer mode and is trying to boot normally, which obviously fails since you removed half the disk, right?

Try with another stick, and get back if it doesn't help.

[BadTicket]

Yes, the problem is after removing the external disk.
I format an other USB stick with FAT32 and copy the install files on it. But always the same problem, wenn I press the power switch and plug in the cable, the LED is immediately green and turns to purple after a couple of minutes. Then, nothing happens anymore.
Any other possibilities?

THX amd Heavenicetrip! Fe/2

[johannes]

Yes, other possibility is that the disk is bad, but that can't be it, right? What if you try to reformat the disk before? Far back in my head I have a faint memory of similar problems, could it be related to an LVM volume existing on the disk, and some bug in the installer not managing that correctly? What if you manually remove that volume on the disk before installing?

You can always ssh into the installer (while installing, so you have to be quick and do it before it fails, the LED has to be green), kill the install process (from memory: processes installer.sh and mkfs.ext3 if that already started) and then run the installer manually. You will then see log output in the terminal, and perhpas figure out what hte problem is.

[BadTicket]

Thanks for your help, but this is to much for me. I'm a computer user, nor a developer. So SSH and things like that are unknown to me. I bought the B3 because I hope this would be a out-of-the-box thing, but it seems that the developers are not thinking who is using this tools. Like many other producer

I try to use it again with the external HD attached, but I can do what I want. When I press the power button and plug in the cord the LED is immediately green and changes to purple later, when I don't press the power button the led is purple from the beginning and will not change.

So, what can I do with this? Anybody who can help with an easier trick or somebody who wants to buy it

Heavenicetrip! Fe/2

[BadTicket]

So, I try the next thing: I unbox the HD, reformat it and but it back. But the same thing, green when pressing the power button, purple if not. And the LED is ready before the HD starts to work. So I think the problem is not the HD, it's the B3 itself.

Any possibility to do a "deep" reset of the firmware?

THX and Heavenicetrip! Fe/2

[Ubi]

If you can log in during the green period and break the instaaler before it goes green, then why not change the installer to only set up the ssh nvironment and the ability for end user to run the rest manually. That should solve so many install problems.

[BadTicket]

It absolutely impossible to be quicker that the green LED, because when I plug in the cord the LED is green in the same second. So it could be possible when the LED is green and before it changes to purple, would that be OK?
And if so, how can I set up a SSH environment? And what I have to do there?

[Binkem]

I guess that's what Johannes and Ubi meant.

[johannes]

Yes, after becoming green but before purple. Use the WAN port, and check your router log for which IP your B3 takes during installation. Then just ssh to is, do 'ps' to check which processes to kill, and manually restart the install shell script to get the log output.

This was partly from memory so apologies if I missed out on something.

[johannes]

If you can log in during the green period and break the instaaler before it goes green, then why not change the installer to only set up the ssh nvironment and the ability for end user to run the rest manually. That should solve so many install problems.

This is almost what we did, for users who want manual control it's just to log in, just as with a rescue stick, kill the process and restart it to get log output. The problem perhaps has been that we never told anyone this was possible?

[BadTicket]

OK, I read about SSH in the web and start the Terminal on my Mac using "ssh 10.0.1.19" and "ssh 10.0.1.19 -p 22" because this is the IP and the port of the B3 (I useed t to contact the B3 from outside). All I geht is: Operation timed out

[johannes]

note that you need to connect using the WAN port, and that the IP not neccessarily is the same as what you had before. So connect the WAN port, and check your router for what IP it has.

[BadTicket]

OK, thanks for that. I get it now, but when I try to connect it I must gave in the password. But now, I can type in any password that I aver used, even the "admin" itself, but I never get access
Any idea what the password should be?

[Gordon]

did you try root:excito?