Snap Server 4500 Recovery Woes

[gish]

Hi all,

I have 2 x Snap 4500 servers that were originally running Guardian OS 2.6.050, I've managed to upgrade one of the servers to Guardian OS 4.4.049 however the second had some problems, and now when switched on, it loads straight into the Snap Server Recovery page.

I've tried to install a fresh copy of 4.4.049 and also 4.3.007 onto that server from the recovery page however it doesn't work, this is the debug output:

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Fetching ...

unmounting /updater
Making temp ramdisk...
mke2fs 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
Building /updater ramdisk of size=120000
Fetching Archive guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu...
The source file is guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu
The target file is /updater/guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu
Fetching local file guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu to /updater/guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu
out of space writing /updater/guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu (wrote 118513664)

Target file may be an image, attempt extraction...
rm: `/updater/lost+found' is a directory
Error: CRC of image failed 0x2D35B3A7

Failed to Extract Image guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu
> Failed to extract image contents.
imageextract guardianos_4.4.049_full_OSImage.gsu /updater/install.sh /updater/platformbytes.txt

Fetch of Archive failed. Check your path and try again.

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The problem seems fairly obvious: Its only creating a ramdisk sized 120000 while both OS images are larger than that. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the original OS to flash back, I believe I need Guardian OS version < 4 installed first before I am able to upgrade to 4.3 / 4.4 (which I have).

Does anyone have any suggestions, tips or pointers on what I can do? I can't seem to find any Guardian OS images floating around anywhere (not even bittorrent / edonkey). Has anyone tried installing a generic Linux distribution on a Snap server and then re-flashing back to Guardian OS?

Any help would be appreciated.

cheers,
Tristan

[Phoenix32]

Your problem is jumping OS versions.

I have found in many cases, mostly with the old 2.x and 3.x versions, and even a couple of the 4.x versions, Guardian needs updates to the later versions WITHIN A REVISION before jumping to the next major revision.

If you can't do this yourself, I do this kind of work and you can contact me via email at phoenix32x@hotmail.com (sorry, I don't check here often anymore).

[gish]

Hi Phoenix32, thanks for your tips, I managed to fix my particular problem by inserting disk0 from the working 4500 into the broken 4500 and booting from that.

From reading other posts of this forum, I understood that the firmware is stored in a (possibly Raid1 array) partition across all disks so it must have rebuilt the array. I then returned the good disk back to the working 4500, shuffled the drives in the bad 4500 and sloted the original first disk into the last slot, and it booted up fine (and I presume rebuilt the guardian os firmware partition on that last disk). It did ask me to re-enter the license key each time I did this, luckily I had these handy.

I still think it's rediculous that it's not possible to download the firmware for your particular device given that its running some form of linux and presumably contains a fair amount of GPL software, has anyone every taken Overland Storage / Adaptec to task over this?

regards,
Tristan