SG-3100 Died With Bad eMMC

FSC830

@jsylvia007 Hm, its long time ago when I did that, and actually I cant remember if I changed any boot environment values.
When looking in manual I found "By default, the M.2 SATA drive will then be the first drive
recognized by pfSense software" and as far as I remember that was all, re-installing the software at ada0...
Unfortunately I do not have access from my current location to the laptop I did connect to the console and logged all output when doing this.
Where did you find an advise to change boot environment?

Regards

stephenw10

You do have to manually update the uboot env when swtching boot device. Some while back the recovery installer was able to set it automatically but no longer does.

jsylvia007

@FSC830 - Its in the instructions now to perform it.

jsylvia007

@stephenw10 - It was a brand-new-in-package drive. Any chance I can dd the drive from the installer or recovery somehow? I don't want to pull it all apart again.

stephenw10

For reference:

Marvell>> printenv bootcmd
bootcmd=run setLED; run m2boot;
Marvell>> printenv m2boot 
m2boot=scsi reset; fatload scsi 0:$m2dev 200000 ubldr.bin; go 200000;

So it's trying to load the boot loader from a fat partition on the drive but instead finding an unknown filesystem there.

You can try:

Marvell>> scsi init
AHCI init for unit0
Target spinup took 0 ms.
SATA link 1 timeout.

Error: SCSI Controller(s) 1B4B:9215 1B4B:9235 not found
scanning bus for devices...
  Device 0: (0:0) Vendor: ATA Prod.: NT-32 Rev: 1.09
            Type: Hard Disk
            Capacity: 30533.8 MB = 29.8 GB (62533296 x 512)
Found 1 device(s).
Marvell>> scsi part 0

Partition Map for SCSI device 0  --   Partition Type: DOS

Part	Start Sector	Num Sectors	UUID		Type
  1	4158      	69993     	00000000-01	0c Boot
  2	74151     	62459145  	00000000-02	a5

Then dig deeper with:

Marvell>> fatls scsi 0:1  
   870156   u-boot.bin 
   949520   u-boot.mmc 
   228648   ubldr.bin 

3 file(s), 0 dir(s)

jsylvia007

@stephenw10 -

So... that worked? I typed out those commands and it showed me exactly what was posted...

stephenw10

Huh so it has the fat partiton on the drive and it contains the file?

I would try manually running the command in m2boot then. See exactly where it fails.

stephenw10

Oh wait what do you have m2dev set to?

Marvell>> printenv m2dev
m2dev=1

And which slot did you add the drive to?

Try setting it to 1 (or 0 if it;s already 1).

jsylvia007

@stephenw10 - WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!

jsylvia007

Wait... Spoke too soon... Setting it to 1 looks like it's trying to boot / read from the eMMC and it's REALLY unhappy about that... Any way to stop it from doing that?

jsylvia007

It says "External Config Loader Started... mmcsd0" and then it goes off to never, never land, which is exactly what I would expect because the MMC is TOAST.

stephenw10

Hmm, that's painful. It should eventually get past that. Once it does I would try to clear the partitions from the eMMC. If it allows that....

jsylvia007

@stephenw10 - It did... It failed into a single user mode, I was able to issue a DD to the eMMC and after a reboot, it no longer sees the MMC device. Note that the DD made it VERY angry also, but I let it run for a bit to make sure that it destroyed as much of the partition table at the beginning as possible. It appears to be happy now!

I'm going to run another factory reset, etc., just to make sure it doesn't get wonky.

Note that when it's in a state with the failed eMMC, the USB terminal is also pretty unstable.

Of note for other folks who stumble across this... Believe it or not, the config file was still there and intact. Before I started all of this, I saw the config, was able to cat it out with the device in read-only, but couldn't get access to it. I couldn't remount it, and because it was read-only, I couldn't mount a USB device on top of it, but I was still able to get it.

I created a tmpfs on top of /mnt (the exact command escapes me, but I think it was mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt. I think I had to make it read/write, but I can't remember off the top of my head how I did that piece (it might have been mount -u /mnt). From there, I was able to mount a USB stick to /mnt, and then copy the file from /cf/config/config.xml to the USB stick.

It took me a LONG time to figure out the tmpfs "hack", but it worked!

stephenw10

As a last resort you can usually just cat the config file and copy/paste it from the console directly.

FSC830

The uboot commands sound somehow familiar to me, but actually I cant remember if I needed to do so.
I cant even remember which version of pfSense was the curretn at this time when adding the m.2 SATA, 21.x or 22.x?

Regards