Tag Archives: plug computer

UBIFS recovery on Plug

Small computers

After the UBIFS was corrupted due to power glitch pluggy the plug computer wouldn’t boot, giving console messages

UBIFS: recovery needed
Error reading superblock on volume 'ubi:rootfs'!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
UBIFS not mounted, use ubifs mount to mount volume first!
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!

Apparently this is a known problem with some versions of UBIFS (1, 2, 3).

To recover the UBIFS, boot plug from USB then

$ sudo su
$ mkdir /tmp/ubifs 
$ ubiattach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 2 
$ mount -t ubifs ubi0:rootfs /tmp/ubifs
$ umount /tmp/ubifs

All being well, on mounting get messages to effect that recovery is needed, and then completed.

Lessons learnt: 1. if plug hangs while doing something, pulling the power isn’t a good recovery optiion 😉 2. It’s useful to have some alternative boot media on hand, and probably worth  investing a little time to set up u-boot commands for these media.

Fixing pluggy

Small computers
Photo of rather dusty, but working, pluggy the plug computer and its attached drive working as file server etc.
rather dusty, but working, pluggy the plug computer and its attached drive working as file server etc.

Pluggy the plug computer isn’t broken, but it’s not all working too well. And I’m not sure how some of the bits that are working are working. And there is a whole load of cruft on there that I tried out and forgot about and who knows whether that is working. And there are some things that could work better, like time to reboot, and being able to run NFS. Anyway, time for an update.

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