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Cloned USB boot drive and now neither will boot XPenology


Badger

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OK... so I decided to delve into Tinycore and DSM7 on my existing setup (3615xs and 6.2.3-25426 Update 3).  I've been running the box for a year or so.

 

I thought it would be prudent to backup my boot usb.  Don't really know why I did that... cause I was going to use a new usb drive for Tinycore anyway.  At any rate, I used Balena Etcher to (try to) clone my existing boot drive.  The target USB is a larger size FWIW.  So I tried to boot with the newly created flash drive and no joy.  Oh well, I'll just put the original back in the same slot and boot... no boot.  I don't have a monitor on the box, but I can tell nothing is happening because there is no chatter from the drives.  I do get a post "beep" though.  I guess Etcher messed up the original boot drive...  Thanks!

 

I put the original USB in a PC and ran Partition Guru (free app).  Partition Guru doesn't immediately show any partitions, but if run their "partition recovery" utility it does find two partitions.  Looks like I can copy all the data if I want to a separate folder on my pc.  It says it can also rebuild the partition table if I buy the "Professional version" of Partition Guru.

 

Please advise if there is another way to get the partitions back... or anything else I can try.  All my XPE NAS data is backed up to another genuine Synology box, so  meanwhile I guess I'll continue with my Tinycore project.

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There isn't really any need to do such a thing.  Keep your configured IMG file and burn a new loader just like you are doing now should you need to recover for any reason.

 

If you must save off your loader image, the Win32 Disk Imager software referred to in the main FAQ works fine.

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the files in question are (jun's loaders for 6.1 and 6.2)

1st partiton:

-grub.cfg, these are you own modifications like usb vid/pid to match the usb's hardware (would need to modded it a different usb is used, one of the reasons just cloning is usually useless), mac of nic(s) (only needed to mod when using WOL but its suggested as its convenient when you nic has the same mac when dsm is started), SN (in most cases no need to mod this one)

 

2nd parttion:

-extra.lzma (contains, among other things, the added driver not coming from dsm itself, if you add a different one then the default is should be kept and documented as it might contain a driver not present in jun's set or a newer version of the driver in jun's set)

-zImage and rd.gz, these linux kernel files will be updated when installing dsm to disk, on jun's 1.03/1.04 its dsm 6.2.0 thats preinstalled but when installing 6.2.3 its replaced with new ones from the installed dsm version, so to keep a recent backup it would be needed to copy these too after installing a dsm update (they can also be extracted from the dsm *.pat fiel used for update but its safer to copy them because after some months you might not remember what dsm version and update level you had installed)

 

Edited by IG-88
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Thanks for the info.  I should have known about the USB vid/pid uniqueness.  At any rate, the migration to 3622xs+ and 7.0.1 went very smoothly via Tinycore.  Data and apps migrated no problem... all disks recognized and so far everything is running the same as before....  even Home Assistant which is 3rd party so I was worried.  The only problem so far is the Shared File Sync I had set up with another (genuine) Synology box fails.  I probably have to redo those links...  Don't know why it broke, but I did have to redo my router setup because of the new MAC address that Tinycore created.  Other than that I'm a happy camper!

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