So, a client of ours needed some work done and we started by upgrading the MT router version 2.8.23 to 2.8.28. Now it won’t boot. I’ve placed the flash card (64MB Hitachi) into 3 different brands of boards and all say the same error “EDBA too big”. We are rather screwed as there is no recent backup and we really need some of the Hotspot user info off of this thing.
So, anyway to recover from this? Is it possible to modify the boot file for LILO if I plop this flash card on a Linux box and mount it? Or, anyway to dump some or all of the configs/files and drop them onto a different flash card with the same version installed?
Many thanks.
So, I managed to recover this unbootable flash card. By mounting it from a linux machine, I had access to the files that reside in the “File” area - we had an older backup there. More importantly, the store directory contains all the configs. So I flashed a new router with the same version, mounted that, and copied the store directory from the old flash onto this new one. Then booted up the new card and exported the whole config and reimported it onto a completely new build (just to make sure my sudo-backfile wasn’t going to have problems). Now I’ve got all the configs on the new card and it’s running perfectly.
I’m curious if I could’ve just replaced the boot file from the same version without juggling all of the configs around? This EDBA error seems common in the Linux world when rebuilding kernels. Rerunning linux or changing the config file to boot the old image fixes this (on a Linux box). So, I’m thinking replacing the boot image might also work on a broken flash disk?