forum.excito.org

Yes, you are completely right. We have recognized the problem, and are now (since about a week) shipping an USB stick with all no-disk orders. Anyone having ordered no-disk Bubba Two before this is free to email us, and we'll ship a free usb memory as well, with the installer present.

jws wrote: Formatting comes AFTER partitioning! You can re-partition only after deleting the existing partitions on the stick, which Windows Disk Management allows you to do.

None of the sticks have used (and bought) let partitions to be added or removed under windows DM.

jws wrote: Some magical programs can grow and shrink partitions without losing data on them, but this is not the rule. So I'd say: after copying any useful data on the stick to somewhere else, first delete all partitions on the stick by means of Disk Management. I'd guess that in that case, "partitioning" will not remain greyed-out.

If after deleting all your partitions in Disk Management you are able to create more than one partition (the first being smaller than the size of the entire stick), your stick must have a partition table.

If everything fails, buy a new stick. My "Kingston" 2 GB stick was only 10 euros.

I did buy a new one. That didn't help either... Unless I'm doing something really stupid, I guess the Bubba has some problems..? If the partitioning stuff is a prerequisite, I wonder what I do wrong here that it doesn't allow me to remove & create more than one partition..

I tried the linux approach on the sticks as well, but it halts in the fdisk stage: it complains about access permissions or so, even though I am logged on as root. When the stick is plugged in, it is rw-mounted by my Suse Linux (from the live DVD).

Is any part related to the cabling essential for installation? Maybe there's something that could cause these problems.. In trying to avoid dependencies, I set the SETDATETIME to zero in the cfg file already.

I would like to comment that from what I have seen in this and other threads, the Excito staff have been very responsive and proactive. They are also themselves going up a learning curve with this new product and the sort of problems that can arise when us excitable users are let loose with a new toy.

There is lots of variation between USB flash drives and many, especially the cheaper ones, are not fully functional . Windows is also not the most user-friendly OS when you want to get under-the-hood and get techie. hastalapasta, I suggest that you take up Excito's offer to send you a drive that they know does work.

Such responsiveness from a company is very rare and should be applauded. Some other companies I've encountered could do well to learn from Excito's approach.

Well done Excito!

[and no, I don't work for them! ]

MSGA wrote: Since we buy a Bubba Two without disc and the USB stick give us a problem I dont think it is correct to sell a sytem like that. I had the possibility to try to use a minidisc from Trekstor instead of the USB stick and after a tip on this forum it worked. But I spend a week to try the USB several USB sticks. Excito must have a solution for this and one is to deliver a stick with the Bubba Two when you not order a Bubba with disc.
/mats

In fact, I ordered a Bubba with disk at a distributor in the NLs, but due to the limited amount of time they had available, I agreed with them to send it to me without installation. I considered the installation process to be something I could do myself in no time. I was wrong...
However, today I received a message from Excito that they've sent me a USB stick that can be used for installation. Sounds like they offer a good service!
I think they will also ship the USB stick std on all diskless Bubba's from now on.
In short: sounds that [y]our concern is being addressed.

Another concern could be the moment you release your powerbutton? Although i formatted my bubba untill now for the 5th time i thought i knew when to release but even last week i did it wrong again...

I now know when it is wrong by looking at the usb stick light. If it blinks everytime it is wrong, if it blinks only at the beginning it is wrong So when it blinks some time regularely and you hear your hardrive spindle it is good. Maybe take this also in consideration? (every usb stick worked so far overhere)

squadra wrote:Another concern could be the moment you release your powerbutton? Although i formatted my bubba untill now for the 5th time i thought i knew when to release but even last week i did it wrong again...

I now know when it is wrong by looking at the usb stick light. If it blinks everytime it is wrong, if it blinks only at the beginning it is wrong So when it blinks some time regularely and you hear your hardrive spindle it is good. Maybe take this also in consideration? (every usb stick worked so far overhere)

Hmm, I read the Bubba HDD data after putting it in a PC, and I saw 3 partitions (swap, system, space) but the blue LED never stopped flashing in this long-short-short on-off sequence... And I let it run for 1 hr or more.
It seemed to install properly, but it never run. So, I sent it back on saturday. Hope to get a new, working one, soon this week.
If this process is really so critical, some extra hints of when and how long to press the power button might be helpful. Maybe some extra flashing of the LED before pushing it for 5 seconds, and also after letting go?

turn bubba off - connect wan directly to modem - Take off power cord - hold reset button - reconnect power cord - wait till it's beginning to flash - release reset button.

You can check if it went ok by looking at the usb light, it has to flash at some occassions during the whole process and not the whole time, in the beginning it will flash some times then you also hear your disk spinning. I really guess your usb stick must be fine but that it is just not installing the whole thing because it goos wrong at the beginning!!

hastalapasta wrote:I considered that as well, although moving around 160 GB for just a simple Bubba-installation is sort of a pain in the ass, especially if we consider getting frequent updates... :--)

Aha. See what you mean; but it is NOT necessary to clean your disk (or stick) before installing a recover or reinstall image on it. The disk (or stick) does not have to be cleaned; only the /install directory inside it. You can keep whatever you like on the stick/disk. Just make sure that

--the disk/stick is (V)FAT formatted (Windows-98 style; because all brands of computers understand this, disks and sticks on the market normally follow this convention out-of-the-box).
-- there is a directory called "install" in the root directory of the stick/disk.
-- this directory is empty apart from the recover/install stuff that has to be there.

In other words, no need to move your 160 GB of data around.

See also

http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?t=1364

especially Secton 2: "Having other files or folders in the root of the USB-stick does not matter." I am fairly sure they also mean: "Having other files or folders in the root of the USB-disk does not matter."

Regards, Jan

jws wrote: Aha. See what you mean; but it is NOT necessary to clean your disk (or stick) before installing a recover or reinstall image on it. The disk (or stick) does not have to be cleaned; only the /install directory inside it. You can keep whatever you like on the stick/disk. Just make sure that

--the disk/stick is (V)FAT formatted (Windows-98 style; because all brands of computers understand this, disks and sticks on the market normally follow this convention out-of-the-box).
-- there is a directory called "install" in the root directory of the stick/disk.
-- this directory is empty apart from the recover/install stuff that has to be there.

In other words, no need to move your 160 GB of data around.

See also

http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?t=1364

especially Secton 2: "Having other files or folders in the root of the USB-stick does not matter." I am fairly sure they also mean: "Having other files or folders in the root of the USB-disk does not matter."

Regards, Jan

I know. But what if a bit flips from 0 to 1 such that not only a reinstallation takes place, but also a wipe of the data partition?
Maybe I am paranoid, but this single line in the install/cnofigurtation script in the install directory needs only 1 bit to flip (altough the right one..) and all my data is gone, right?

hastalapasta wrote: I know. But what if a bit flips from 0 to 1 such that not only a reinstallation takes place, but also a wipe of the data partition?
Maybe I am paranoid, but this single line in the install/cnofigurtation script in the install directory needs only 1 bit to flip (altough the right one..) and all my data is gone, right?

AFAIK bits do not just flip on modern computers unless there is a hardware problem. There are things like checksums, parity bits, error-correcting codes, etc., which prevent bit-flipping very effectively.

Now of course the original Bubba2 as shipped does have a hardware (memory) problem. So if you have a Bubba2 produced before, let's say, the 10th of November 2008, you really should apply the "bootloader upgrade" to fix the memory problem. Perhaps there is even a slight possibility that this fails, because you are using a system which is (in principle) broken to fix itself. But the chance of failure should be infinitesimal. I wouldn't worry about bits flipping if I were you.

Note that there are now 3 ways to boot or upgrade a Bubba 2 from stick/disk:

1 - Complete "wipe and reinstall". If successful, the blue light stops flashing. You get a new Bubba2 back, but you lose all your data. It takes 10 ~15 minutes.

QUESTION to the Excito people: has the "wipe and reinstall" image been updated, so it performs a "bootloader upgrade", when necessary, also?

2 - Reboot without reformat. Specify this in the bubba.conf file in the /install directory of your reboot stick/disk. It reboots a minimal system; this takes only a few seconds. The blue light goes on flashing; there is no indication that the process has finished. You can access a minimal Linux system through the WAN interface, when you have figured out the IP address of the box. You need to have a DHCP server on your network. Only people with some Linux/Debian experience have any hope to perform this procedure successfully. Until, of course, user-level documentation about this is published by Excito; in the meantime you might look at my post

http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?t ... =adventure

3 - Bootloader upgrade. See the "announcements" section on this forum about how to do this. Basically anybody with problems with the Bubba2 should do this first; but only once. Afterwards the Bubba2 will be 100% "bit-flipping-proof". But in any case I wouldn't worry too much about "bit-flipping".

Regards, Jan