[SOLVED] Firmware recovery from DOM partition deletion

[0verdrive]

I thought I'd write this report of an issue I recently had, along with how I recovered, in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar position in the future.

I recently purchased a TS-469L, and while I was waiting for my hard drives to arrive in the mail, decided to throw some old drives in to familiarize myself with the settings. I initialized the system with Raid 1 on the old drives, and played with various settings until I felt comfortable with how everything was set up. At that point, I wanted to change my Raid 1 setup to Raid 5, so that (once I had my new drives) I could just swap them out and upgrade the raid size. However, I couldn't remove the volumes that had been created - the web interface reported an error when it attempted to remove any of the Raid 1 volumes that I'd created. I searched online, and found a suggestion that I could ssh into the box and use fdisk to remove the partitions of the drives, which should set the box back to it's pre-initialized state. Unfortunately, since I'm new to QNAP I didn't realize that (at least on the 469L) /dev/sda is the DOM! So I removed the DOM partitions, in addition to the partitions on the installed drives. (I know - it was a pretty stupid mistake, but I blame unfamiliarity with the system. ) As you can guess, once I rebooted, I was stuck with what appeared to be an expensive brick! I searched online for various solutions, none of which worked fully - but after several hours of troubleshooting, I was able to cobble together a solution that I thought might be useful for others.

The first page I found was qnap's Firmware recovery page (links below). As instructed, I pulled my hard drives, built a bootable D*mn Small Linux thumbdrive, and attempted to boot from the USB drive as instructed. But for some reason, I never did get boot options when pressing F11 while booting - instead it took me to an EFI shell that seemed pretty limited in what I could do. After a bit of trial/error, I found that my usb drive wasn't bootable as expected, and I found better results using Pendrive's USB installer to make a bootable USB drive. (It may be unrelated, but I also found that by sticking the USB drive in the USB-3.0 slots, the NAS would opt to boot from USB automatically, and I didn't need to press F11 to select a boot drive.) Unfortunately, when I tried recovering the firmware with DSL I had two problems: first, the keyboard failed to initialize (despite working prior to booting.) Second, it would time out while autoconfiguring devices, giving me an error that the configuration failed and that I should check bios. At that point (without a working keyboard) I was pretty much stuck. Eventually, I decided to use a 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop Live image, which booted fine. I didn't have a mouse connected to the NAS, but I was able to hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get to a command prompt, which was all I needed. After verifying that the image would boot, I powered the unit back down, pulled the USB drive and also copied the full (factory test version 1.x.x) image onto the thumb drive. I then booted into Ubuntu again, and used "dd" to write the full image to /dev/sda, which recreated the partitions and made the device bootable again.

Code: Select all

dd if=/cdrom/F_TS-469_20140516-1.2.8.img of=/dev/sda
# (Note that if anyone else uses this approach, the source location of the factory image will vary, depending on your ISO.)

I then pulled the USB drive and rebooted, and was happy to see the NAS boot as expected. Even better, QFinder could now find it on the network! Unfortunately, my happiness was short-lived. As outlined in the firmware recovery page, the full image is a factory test image, which can't provision the external hard drives, and needs to be updated to offically released firmware. However, QFinder failed when attempting to update the firmware, and I ended up needing to manually update it myself. After much trial/error, I believe that the failure was due to the fact that /mnt/HDA_ROOT was unmounted (without any drives to mount) and there wasn't enough space on the DOM to copy the official firmware into place prior to upgrading. I resolved this by following a portion of the "Manually Updating Firmware" page, taking the following steps:

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# Copy official firmware onto USB thumb drive (root directory)
# Insert thumb drive into (already running) QNAP box
# Use dmesg and fdisk -l /dev/sd* to determine which device was my thumb drive - in my case /dev/sde1

mkdir /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update
rm -rf /mnt/update
ln -sf /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update /mnt/update
mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update
/etc/init.d/update.sh /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update/TS-469_20140612-4.1.0.zip

# **remove usb thumbdrive**
reboot

At some point during this process, my thumb drive got wiped somehow. Not sure what happened, but it wasn't a big deal, I just used putty's psftp to copy the official firmware to the already mounted USB thumb drive on the NAS, and proceeded with the steps above. My biggest mistake at this point was forgetting to remove the USB drive before rebooting. Because it had been wiped, but was still bootable, the NAS tried to boot from the thumb drive, and failed, making it look like the last firmware upgrade had bricked my NAS again. At that point, I went back to the first step and repeated the entire procedure - it wasn't until later that I realized that my NAS was fine and I cost myself another hour or so of troubleshooting because I left my thumb drive in when rebooting.

Anyway, I hope this writeup will help someone else out in the future. The recovery can be done relatively quickly if you know where to find all the necessary tools and images, and if you can figure out how to pull the various instructions together to resolve issues along the way. I've included links below to all the tools and images I used - anyone not using a 469L will obviously need firmware specific to their device, but this approach should help if you find yourself without a DOM partition.

Firmware Recovery Guide for x86-based NAS
Manually Updating Firmware
TS-469L Full Image (Version 1.x.x => Factory Test)
Official Updated Firmware
Pendrive Universal USB Installer
32-bit Ubuntu Desktop Live ISO
Putty PSFTP

[doktornotor]

Cool first post! Welcome to the forum!

[darth_max]

This post saved my Day! Or maybe better my night!

Only one thing for TS-1079 Pro and TS-1270 U Users (maybe other models based on these Plattforms also): You have to unzip the img File direct to the USB Root Folder. Otherwise the box came up with:

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[~] # /etc/init.d/update.sh /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update/TS-1270U_20140612-4.1.0.zip
cksum=3210660901
Check RAM space available for FW update: OK.
Using 120-bit encryption - (QNAPNASVERSION4)
sig: >
 icpnas
[Firmware Upgrade] System update failed. Firmware file format error. Error code: FW004

[kachijs]

Hello. i have the same problem. I also accidentally wiped DOM partitions. i have no partitions on /dev/sda

I have TS-251 and i tried your method, but without luck. Maybe im not using factory firmware ?

[pwilson]

Try Firmware image: F_TS-X51_20140916-1.2.8.img.

[kachijs]

Yes Patrick this was my second problem (At first i used 4.2.0 firmware unpacked from zip file), but then i downloaded this factory's firmware for x51 system (It was twice the size of 4.2.0). Following this guide by copying img to /dev/sda it created partitions and booted up my NAS. I however was able to update to 4.2.0 through Qfinder and didnt have to perform manual upgrade steps.

[Mark Howard]

Hello group. First post. While this post is closed, this is somewhat my issue. I have a VS-4016 pro with corrupt firmware... after exhausting efforts to restore via every forum method found (literally 100+ hours), I decided to write the factory image for the TS-459 to my VS-4016. Surprisingly, I am able to now boot and connect to the device. However, every attempt to write the correct VS-4016 firmware or even the user firmware for the TS-459 fails. Have tried terminal commands, admin web page and via Qfinder. Would anyone happen to have the complete image or factory image for the VS-4016? Would anyone happen to have any other suggestions. While I'm a noob to Linux, in the last 100+hours working on this stubborn beast has proven invaluable. Thank you much! - Mark (Savannah, GA)

[Mark Howard]

Responding under my own post. <SOLVED FINALLY> Thank you Overdrive, your original post help the most. Not a journey I would want to enbark on again anytime soon, but the education and satisfaction of figering something out ourselves is priceless!

[leroy1980]

Great mate. This is the only solution that worked.
Thanks

[rabbivj]

I ran into the same problem today and this pretty much solved my problem as well.

[hendo3000]

This thread should be the top post on google for qnap firmware, it needs more keywords. I toiled with the qnap wiki telling to use a ps2 mouse and vga monitor with DSL forever until I found this post.

Thanks so much for the excellent tutorial!

[90Ninety]

Does anyone know how to clone the DOM drives?

I got a blank replacement DOM drive , I connected a usb fly lead to it and tried many different cloning softwares on Windows , nothing works ( tried Easus Backup / Clonezilla)

Next I will try Acronis and DD in Linux

[userking88]

after the very first steps dd if=/cdrom/F_TS-469_20140516-1.2.8.img of=/dev/sda

i see after a reboot testu43503 login:
is this a right output ? its a black windows. or is there something wrong ?


i get error after using
/etc/init.d/update.sh /mnt/HDA_ROOT/update/dom.img
[Firmware Update] System update failed. Error code: FW001

i unziped the firmware and got the image and rewrite it to dom.img

so what can i do now ??? is it normal that the codes before get no output ??? i mean there is nothing noticed after i use the code snippeds

may i use some wrong order structure ?? or is this always the same

[schumaku]

i unziped the firmware and got the image and rewrite it to dom.img

Please stick exactly with what is documented in the QNAPedia ...

[userking88]

dont understand what you mean


i added some images i have now used without change file name