Problem: I have a netgear stora I do not know the password of (nor username). I reset it to factory settings, bricked out of the configuration process as it requires a connection to mystora.com, which is no longer active. I can get a TTL serial connection with a Arduino Uno R3. I can boot into recovery, not of much use. I cannot get root by tftp as the alternative.tar.bz2 file is no longer available (not even archive.org)
But I can interrupt the boot process with the ttl connection and drop into the uboot console.
I can attempt to boot debian at least via usb, then try to chroot into the original system and setup a user/change root password
Or I straight up flash debian on the internal storage
Following https://sigri44.github.io/OpenStora/wiki/index_How_to_install_Debian_Linux_on_NETGEAR_Stora.html
Connect the stora to the computer via an ethernet cable
Interrupt the boot process by pressing a key when asked in console
Follow this guide
Connect stora to ethernet Set server and stora ip appropriately Set date and time with command date MMDDhhmmssYY. es date 0928021124 sets the date to 28th Sep(09) 2024, time 02:11a.m. You may need to disable the firewall on the computer You may need to provide absolute paths to tftpboot
Boot the system and procede to install debian on the usb stick
You may need to retry the automatic network recognition a couple times
The ramdisk is created to boot debian squeeze, which is ancient. Mirrors will fail to find files even when using archive mirror archive.debian.org/debian When presented with the error, say no and choose the stable version
Currently fails with an error about a file not being downloaded, whatever the debian version
So create format the usb stick as ext3, mount it. Create a system using debootstrap on the pendrive
sudo debootstrap --arch=armel --foreign --include=aptitude,apt,nano,sudo squeeze /mnt/debian-pendrive/ http://archive.debian.org/debian
Then change the booting command to start bash at boot, otherwise there’s nothing to execut at any runlevel
setenv bootargs $(console) root=/dev/sda1
This does the thing better than I could. The approach is the same but I missed the debootstrap second stage stuff https://github.com/evgkirov/stora-debian-install. Once booted install mtd-utils to mount the onboard NAND
However the guide changes the boot arguments to boot directly from usb. To boot from nand again use
setenv bootcmd 'nand read 0x2000000 0x10000 0x30000; bootm'
Now I’m trying to build my owm image that uses the latest debian stable (bookworm at the time of writing). I might also try to compile my own modern kernel. I’m still using the 3.10 kernel now. The guide works, but to chroot into the ARM environment on archlinux the packages qemu-user-static and qemu-user-static-binfmt are needed. After installing restart systemd-binfmt. Binfmt allows the kernel to read exec formats for other archs.