LinkStation Fix

Diagnosing the Problem

The LinkStation hard drive was connected to my Knoppix PC using an IDE-USB adapter and Knoppix automatically created desktop shortcuts for partition 1 (firmware) and partition 3 (data). I discovered that there are a few things to do prior to investigating the problem:

1. The partitions must be mounted before they can be accessed - just double-clicking the desktop shortcut.
2. By default Knoppix mounted the partitions as read-only and this had to be changed to read-write by right-clicking the desktop shortcut for the partition and modifying the appropriate box in the in the properties.
3. If trying to do any thing via the command prompt, it is better if you have logged in as “root” using the su command.

I concentrated my activities on partition 1 (/dev/sda1) because I was confident that partition 3 (with all my data) was fine, but before partition 1 can be accessed the magic number identifier for the partition must be corrected:

./fix_ext2_magic --fix /dev/sda1 Sorts out the format magic number which Buffalo have changed from standard. It said it had fixed a load of magic numbers, but I still could not access the partition.

I then used the following utilities in an attempt to identify the problem:

e2fsck -f -j -c /dev/sda1 This was an attempt to check the file system, but it complained bitterly with failed reads at various blocks - even suggesting I had a zero size partition.
badblocks -v /dev/sda1 This was an attempt to bad block check the partition. It declared that I had 383992 bad blocks, which was precisely all of them! This shook me a bit, so I ran it a few times whereupon I noticed that the USB Hard Drive adapter activity light was not even blinking, so the utility was not even accessing the partition it was condemning.

Fixing the Problem

I concluded that the partition must be corrupted to the extent that even low-level utilities were being twarted. Eventually I decided that the partition was lost because just accessing had such a crippling effect Knoppix even other drives and partitions could not be accessed afterwards. Knoppix would not even shutdown properly.

Next I discovered and used the Knoppix GUI version of the partition editor parted to remove and remake the partition. I had to reboot during this because Knoppix collapsed after after accessing the partition! Then I used the following commands to finish off:

mke2fs -j -c -v /dev/sda1 This formatted the partition as ext3.
tar -vxz --numeric-owner -p -f ../tmpimage-OL-0.52b-LS2.tgz This extracted my OpenLink 0.52 firmware. I could not get the tar command to extract to any directory other than the one I was in, so I used cd to change to the /dev/sda1 partition before running the command, hence the “../” in front of the tarball filename.

After all this, the previous commands, e2fsck and badblocks all worked fine and revealed no problems. Also, I discovered that after the tarball firmware image has been extracted onto the sda1 partition, the LinkStation can be reassembled and fired up. There is no need to change the ext2 magic number back the the special one Buffalo uses.