B2 - reinstall fails

[petka]

Hello everyone.

I've been bubba user for some time. It only happened yesterday, when after shrinking and reformatting the whole bubba box it never returned to the previous state. These are steps that I have undertaken:

- I executed iptables -F.... (yeah yeah I know but why b2 does not have a console?)
- I copied all of my data in order to shrink all partitions and re-format it
- I re-installed the whole bubba box

Now the problem is, that after 3-rd or 4-th attempt to format the server and start over my router does not see any new client as far as DHCP table. LED's are OK - there is a still blue light what denotes that system have been installed. I am sure my HDD is OK as otherwise I would not be able to copy the data, what I have described above.
I tried many ways of connecting to it - through the WAN port, to the LAN port, even to my computer. I also tried setting up the 192.168.10.2 address on my laptop so I could reach bubba at 192.168.10.1. None of these attempts helped.

Anyone knows what I can do in this situation ? I have seen tiny holes on bubbas' motherboard that look as if it was a serial port, so arguably I could get the console access, and see what's going on there?

Thanks for any suggestions in advance,
Peter

[Cheeseboy]

Hi Peter,

Before going down the route of installing a RS-232/USB interface I would start by trying to boot the Bubba2 with a rescue USB image. You can then (if it boots successfully) mount /dev/sda1 and check the log files to find out what is going wrong, and then hopefully fix whatever it is.
http://wiki.excito.org/wiki/index.php/Rescue_System

Good luck!

[Ubi]

yes, or use the rescue disk to set up a boot script that echos the output of ifconfig to a file, then reboot normally, boot the rescue and read the output of the file. It's clunky but it works rather well.

[petka]

Hello guys,

Thank you for your pieces of advice. I just have tried starting bubba2 from the rescue disk in the rescue mode. Unfortunately - I don't see anything @ DHCP table... It's kind of interesting, as FULL reinstall + shrinking disks should give me the access. Until now all of my tries were futile. I thought it's kind of transient problem... anyway :

I would like to try the second option, that is starting the bubba2 with an individual script that would give me a little better overview.

@Ubi : could you please tell me a little bit more what should I do ? From what I see I have to set up my own script that's einstall.sh (if I am thinking the right way) :
# Instead of default installer execute
# /install/einstall.sh if available instead
#
#USE_EXTERNAL_SCRIPT=1

so, - I uncomment the use external script, and then put the file into /install/einstall.sh and after that what should I put there to save back the state to the USB (ifconfig -a >> ???) (I am not sure what would be the USB device name). Or... anything else what I could put there?

Pete

[Cheeseboy]

Hi Pete,

I'm afraid you misunderstood Ubi.
His advice requires the rescue boot to succeed. The idea was that you write a script that will then execute when the normal boot occurs, i.e. the script resides on your hard disk and is executed when the normal boot fails and records the network status at that time so you can later reboot with the rescue image and read it.

Have you tried another DHCP server/router?
Is the bubba indicating it is up after booting on the rescue stick (continuous blue LED)?
Have you tried probing the most likely IP addresses (192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc.) after booting on the rescue stick?

[petka]

Hey there Cheese,

I've tried 192.168.0.* ip's but none of them worked. I'll try another router tomorrow and will let you know if the box wants to collaborate.

Pete