SG-1100 upgrade horror, now brick
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Oh man, what a ride...
I wanted to upgrade one of my SG-1100s yesterday from 22.05 to 23.01 and then to the latest 23.05.1.
The online upgrade to 23.01 failed due to the 800K problem (https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/upgrades-1100-2100.html).
So, okay, no problem...I already had my USB thumb drive with the latest 23.05.1 ready. No matter what I tried, I wasn't able to boot into the installer (the same USB thumb drive worked with my second SG-1100, successfully upgraded to 23.05.1 there).
I opened a ticket with Netgate support, and they sent me a bunch of setenv commands, but no dice. The support now told me it's dead.
My SG-1100 was rock stable before I touched it yesterday morning.
The boot process of the installer stops here:_ __ / _|___ ___ _ __ ___ ___ _ | '_ \| |_/ __|/ _ \ '_ \/ __|/ _ \ _| |_ | |_) | _\__ \ __/ | | \__ \ __/ |_ _| | .__/|_| |___/\___|_| |_|___/\___| |_| |_| +---- Welcome to Netgate pfSense Plus ----+ __________________________ | | / ___\ | 1. Boot Multi user [Enter] | | /` | 2. Boot Single user | | / :-| | 3. Escape to loader prompt | | _________ ___/ /_ | | 4. Reboot | | /` ____ / /__ ___/ | | 5. Cons: Video | | / / / / / / | | | | / /___/ / / / | | Options: | | / ______/ / / _ | | 6. Kernel: default/kernel (1 of 1) | |/ / / / _| |_ | | 7. Boot Options | / /___/ |_ _| | | | / |_| | | | /_________________________/ +-----------------------------------------+ / Autoboot in 0 seconds. [Space] to pause Loading kernel... /boot/kernel/kernel text=0x2a8 text=0xc09a90 text=0x14494fc data=0x1f0c48 data=0x0+0x2a5000 0x8+0x189c78+0x8+0x19c96a| Loading configured modules... can't find '/etc/hostid' can't find '/boot/entropy' No valid device tree blob found! WARNING! Trying to fire up the kernel, but no device tree blob found!So what I learned... never update without a spare device, especially the SG-1100 seems very fragile.
-Rico
2x Netgate XG-7100 | 11x Netgate SG-5100 | 6x Netgate SG-3100 | 2x Netgate SG-1100
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@Rico …… Sorry for your loss.
However - I had a bit of an issue with a 1100 as well - it is a rather fragile device in my experience, and I could not for the life of me get it to boot on 23.01 from USB. In the end I found a 22.05 recovery image I had stored, and I could install that just fine (with ZFS).
AFter that I just upgraded inline to 23.01 (and now 23.05.1), so….. Maybe give it a shot? -
Thanks for your input keyser. I already tried to reflash 22.05 yesterday but no chance.
Do you remember what your error was?-Rico
2x Netgate XG-7100 | 11x Netgate SG-5100 | 6x Netgate SG-3100 | 2x Netgate SG-1100
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@Rico Sorry to hear that.
No, I can’t remember where it stalled, but I think it was related to some missing U-boot update or something.
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@Rico Just from the back of my head…. Wasn’t there something with the SG-1100 where it could get the hardware into a non functioning state that required you to power it off completely and wait a while before it would work properly again? I’m sure you have tried that, but just in case….
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Yeah wasnt this after U-Boot upgrade? I unplugged the device like 100 times since yesterday and left it with no power over night.
Now I also tried to boot into pfSense-plus-SG-1100-recovery-21.02-RELEASE-aarch64.img.gz and pfSense-netgate-SG-1100-recovery-2.4.5-RELEASE-p1-aarch64.img.gz but get always the same error 'No valid device tree blob found!'.-Rico
2x Netgate XG-7100 | 11x Netgate SG-5100 | 6x Netgate SG-3100 | 2x Netgate SG-1100
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@Rico Well, then it probably is a dead device… Sorry :-(
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@Rico I’m sure you tried this as well. Stephen really knows the in’s and out’s of Netgate hardware:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/165397/sg-1100-no-valid-tree-blob-found-after-power-cut
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Well the problem is I get this error when booting the installer from USB thumb. The local MMC is empty anyway because it gets erased after 'run usbrecovery' command.
-Rico
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@keyser said in SG-1100 upgrade horror, now brick:
No, I can’t remember where it stalled, but I think it was related to some missing U-boot update or something.
Did you open a ticket with TAC>
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Yes, #1746268942 if you like to check.
-Rico
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@Rico Yep, Let's keep digging into the ticket and see what we can come up with.
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My SG-1100 is up and running again after a few more setenv commands
Thanks to all supporters!-Rico
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@Rico Glad to hear you got it fixed. For posterity I was going to ask if you tried a different and/or smaller USB. This thread is for a 3100 but that worked for this person:
MordyT said in After upgrade to 23.05.1, pfSense on Netgate 3100 basically dead:
Of note, you can't use just any flash drive - a 5 year old 64GB Kingston USB3.0 drive would crash during the run recovery stage and I had to dig out a 8GB USB2.0 drive for it to work.
and...
@keyser said in SG-1100 upgrade horror, now brick:Wasn’t there something with the SG-1100 where it could get the hardware into a non functioning state that required you to power it off completely
You may be thinking of https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/troubleshooting/upgrades.html#segmentation-fault-in-pkg ? IIRC that was a one time thing and fixed in later updates. (edit: the driver/condition was fixed so it didn't get into that state)
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@Rico said in SG-1100 upgrade horror, now brick:
No valid device tree blob found!
WARNING! Trying to fire up the kernel, but no device tree blob found!That error implies it has failed to load the dtb file at boot. That means the file it tried to load wasn't present. So either it failed to access the file because it couldn't see the media or the file wasn't on the media. Or that the file it was trying to load was incorrect. The latter was the case here, the uboot env that contains the file name was wrong.
Steve
