Completely recovering from a bricked Buffalo Link.Station LS2.NAS and opening the firmware tooI recently bought a Buffalo Link.Station LS2.NAS network attached storage device.The device itself is a good quality piece of hardware, but the software leaves a lot to be desired.I bought this NAS purely as a redundant i.RAID1 backup solution and intended to use it as an SSH server for my rsync backup scripts.Much to my disappointment, however, the firmware came far more locked down than I had hoped, and provided no means to easily enable SSH.In my struggles to find an elegant solution to this, I ended up bricking the device, meaning it would no longer boot.To make matters worse, I later found out that the LS2.I had wiped while cleaning down the disks.Completely recovering from a bricked Buffalo LinkStation LS200series NAS and opening the firmware too.Install Linux On Buffalo Link Station Emergency Mode' title='Install Linux On Buffalo Link Station Emergency Mode' />The information available online for unbricking andor opening the firmware of the LS2.I ended up having to contact Buffalo support in order to rectify everything.Thinking theyd tell me Id voided my warranty and couldnt help me as such, I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful they were in providing me TFTP Boot instructions, including all the relevant software and images required.This post should act as a definitive guide to unbricking your LS2.Ive even provided instructions on how to open up the firmware, enabling SSH, Telnet and more.Note that you will lose all data on your NAS, so perform any backups where possible.This guide assumes you are running Linux and that your NAS is a Link.Station LS2.Part 1 Wiping the drives.Open up the front plate on your LS2.Take a Phillips head screwdriver and remove the screws on both hard drive mounting plates, so that the drives come away.Attach the hard drives to your computer.You can do this using a USB SATA hard drive 3.I bought this oneor, if you have spare SATA and power cables, just connect it directly to your computers motherboard.Open up a terminal and run GNU Parted on the block device representing the connected hard drive.Be careful during this part, as you dont want to wipe your computers primary drive.In my case, the NAS drive shows up as devsdb so I run Parted as follows sudo parted devsdb.Using the parted print command, we can see that there are six partitions on the NAS drive by default.Number Start End Size.B 1.MB 1.MB. 2 1.MB 6. 14. 4MB 5.MB.MB 6. 14. 4MB 3.B.MB 6.MB 5. B. 5 6.MB 7.MB 1.MB. 6 7.MB 2. 99. 2GB 2.GB.Lets go ahead and remove all of them.Great You can now unplug this hard drive and repeat the above process for the other drive.Once both drives are done, screw the mounting plates back on to the hard drives and install them back into the NAS.Part 2 TFTP Boot.This step involves flashing a minimal image to the drives, allowing it to boot into EM Mode.EM Mode allows us to get our final, fully working firmware image on to the NAS.Unfortunately, youll need a Windows PC for this part.I just ran a Windows 7 VM with a network interface bridged to my hosts eth.Connect your PC directly to your NAS with an Ethernet cable.Plug in and power on your NAS.After a few seconds, the LED on the front will flash red to let you know it failed to boot anything.The NAS will assign itself an IP address of 1.You will need to set Windows to a static IP of 1.TFTP Boot image.To do this, open up Control Panel Network and Sharing Center and click Change adapter settings.Right click your network adapter and click Properties.Double click Internet Protocol Version 4 TCPIPv.Choose Use the following IP address and set the below values IP address 1.Subnet mask 2.Default gateway leave blankThen click OK and OK again to leave the Properties screen.Download the TFTP Boot server and images from the link below.I received these from Buffalo support and am hosting them here for convenience TFTP Boot Recovery LS2.Unzip the downloaded file and launch the TFTP Boot.The program should tell you its listening On 1.If not, you have not configured your network adapter correctly.The bottom line should read accepting requests with a flashing cursor.Press the physical Function button on the back of your NAS until the LEDs start flashing white.The TFTP Boot window should now output two messages like below Client 1.Blocks Served.Client 1.Blocks Served.Great At this point, your NAS will be booting a minimal image and will boot itself into EM Mode.You can close the TFTP Boot program, as we are done with it now.Part 3 Opening up the stock firmware image SSH, Telnet, Download the NAS Navigator program from the link below.This should work in Linux under WineCrossover NAS Navigator.Unzip and install the program by running Nas.Navi.Inst. exe. Now run the NAS Navigator program.After a few seconds, your NAS should show up.Note that it is in Emergency mode and has an IP address in the range 1.Repeat the instructions from Part 2, Step 3 above, but this time set an IP address of 1. Ms Office 2003 Norwegian Onenote Isolation here. How We Got The Bible Chart .Very important Note the subnet masks third number is a 0 zero and not 2.Download and unzip the latest firmware for your device from the Buffalo website below http www.Download and unzip the linkstation mod tools from Git.Hub below linkstation mod You can also clone the repo if youre comfortable using Git.Open up a terminal and browse to the linkstation mod directory.Run the open ls rootfs.Bonus root login to NAS Add your SSH public key to the data directory and rename it idrsa.This will automatically install the key and grant you root access to the NAS.Very important If you are not the root user, you must use sudo to execute the script due to some permissions requirements making dev files.I spent hours trying to figure out why my Link.Station wouldnt boot as a result of running this as a regular user.After the script has completed, you will see a new directory out.Inside this directory is the hackedopened hddrootfs.You will need to change the permissions on this back to your regular user.For example, if your username is aaron sudo chown aaron aaron.Copy this new hddrootfs.Back in Windows sorry, open up the firmware directory and open up the configuration file LSUpdater.Add the following lines to the bottom to enable Debug Mode.Debug 1.Run the LSUpdater.It should find your NAS.Click the window decoration in the top left corner and click DebugDTick and untick the appropriate options until your configuration looks as below Click OK, then Update.You should now get a pop up window saying Formatting, followed by Transferring firmware.And thats it Your Link.Station LS2.
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November 2017
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