Help Bricked C3000

[devster]

 

Yeh, I can see the humorous side, one post I get kismet working, the next its bricked!

The short -  the sharp boot screen comes up (so not fully bricked), and a message "grep: /var/lib/pcmcia/stab: No such file or directory" keeps continually displaying at the bottom of the status indication, over and over.

It wont boot from there.

Before I go playing around with all the same fun as opther people with bricked C3000s, I thought someone may have aquick fix. The wierd thing is that this happened after :

1. Installed Kismet, as per another kismet/c3000 thread on here
2. Scanned with Kismet... successfully working.. picking up APs
3. Added some other networks, tried to connect to them, couldnt.
4. Tried to restart kismet within kismetQT, but it said I couldn't, since it couldnt contact the server.
5. I closed QT, but kismet still running (confirmed with a ps -ef) , so I do a soft reboot. The wireless was still connected at that point, I couldnt close it because kismet had control of it.
6. Upon bootup, the machine is bricked, with forementioned message.

Did I do something wrong Or does this sometimes happen?? Its a very very early C3000... thanks for any help.

cheers,
Devon

[ivo]

The quickest fix is probably to reinitialize the device. There is somewhere some menuoption to do this (I think it's in the same menu as the flashupgrade - i.e. hold 'ok' while booting)

Alternatively, you could use a 'hacked' updater.sh to boot into the flash linux environment and try to fix things from ther (or disable qpe, get a simple loginprompt and have a look at what exactly is wrong)

Does this problem also occur when no wlancard is inserted?

Cheers

  Ivo

[devster]

Yep, even without the wlan card, same thing.

Ive managed to get to a terminal root prompt (D+B reboot), but thats as far as Ive got. Im not sure what the filesystem is supposed to look like. I assume that screwing with the network settings has somehow corrupted the network settings files.

Whats also strange is that someone else had exactly the same problem - they did a restore to fix it. However, Im left wondering if its something that could happen to any C3000s. They also purchased from Conics. I'll ask Conics if they know of a fix.

eg at same problem

cheers,
D.

[ivo]

Yep, even without the wlan card, same thing.

During my hacking session today I ran into the following code, in /root/etc/rc.d/rc.rofilesys:

get_dev_pcmcia()
{
while read SOCKET CLASS DRIVER INSTANCE DEVS MAJOR MINOR;
do
    echo $DEVS
done
}
get_dev_pcmcia_slot()
{
    grep "^$1" /var/lib/pcmcia/stab | get_dev_pcmcia
}


which is used to determine (in a loop) which /dev device your disk is on:

# mount HDD
/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start
while [ "$IDE1" = "" ]; do
        IDE1=`get_dev_pcmcia_slot 1`
done


For some reason, this fails. There might be a problem with /var, which is a symlink to /home/system/var (and /home is a separate mtd device, mtd3), pcmcia might be failing (due to misconfiguration?)

Hard to say from here - any more info you can give from your current environment?

Cheers

  Ivo

[Charlovski]

Whats also strange is that someone else had exactly the same problem - they did a restore to fix it. However, Im left wondering if its something that could happen to any C3000s. They also purchased from Conics. I'll ask Conics if they know of a fix.

It also happened twice with my Dynamism unit. I remember that the first time I tried out a borrowed SD memory card and probably forgot to unmount it before a reboot. Eventually after a couple of hard resets / removing battery it actually stopped looping and booted ok. The second time I don't know what caused it but it wasn't related to SD or CF cards (don't have any yet). The Z was usb tcp/ip connected though. Hard resetting / battery removal didn't solve the problem, so I had to do a restore.

[devster]

sounds exactly the same - I didnt unmount the wlan properly either, and did a hard reset.

Im back and running, but Im not real impressed I just had to do a restore on it.....

In the meantime, workarounds possibly are to forcibly unmount at all costs before a reset!