Leaderboard

Agreed, this is possibly the biggest stumbling block here - not everyone has a drawer full of ancient old sticks. The vast majority of mine have already been written to death or given away as uselessly small years ago and their modern replacements - even the cheap giveaway ones - do not have controllers recognised by chip genius. I got lucky that my nearly 10 years old Memtest stick was suitable. It's a 4Gb Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly. The Phison based 2Gb Toshiba SLC DOM I purchased was not. I'm hoping to do all the experimentations on the USB drive so if I kill it or corrupt the image or whatever, I can just put the Synology DOM back in and we're back up and running. Ideally I can find a programmable DOM because all-internal is neater but a USB stick will do for the R&D.

Update: Found an old Phison USB stick, flashed the PID/VID in a Windows XP VM and restored the original img. My DS booted finally from the USB stick, and once I've got terminal access I restored the img to the DOM directy on the Synology. Everything works again now, thanks for the hints : ) Admittedly the flash tools are indeed a bit shady but got the job done.