Rustam

Connecting the disk

Connect the new disk to a Linux PC. (A windows PC booted from a Linux Live CD or -usb stick is fine). You can use an USB-SATA converter, or connect the disk on an in- or extern SATA port.

Note: the instructions below apply to Home Media Network Hard Drive (aka classic) only. Do not try with Home Media Cloud Edition (model: HMND2) which won’t work. For Home Media Cloud Edition box try with image restore discussed in forum thread – http://forum.nas-central.org/viewtopic.php?f=269&t=4703. I’ve restored my 1TB HMND2 successfully with the method. For 0 disk free space issue after image restore just execute the factory restore option once the box is online with GUI accessible. Browse the first 2 pages of the thread you should get the idea where to download and what command to restore the image.

Find device name

Find the device name of the disk:

cat /proc/partitions

You can recognize the disk by it’s size. (The size is given in ‘blocks’, which is 1 KiB)

I’ll assume the disk is sdb for the rest of the story.

Collect files

Download mbr+uboot+kernel.gz and sda1-2064.tgz here.

Become root

You’ll need to have root rights to do the next steps. In Ubuntu or Knoppix you can get these by executing

sudo su

In most other flavors you just execute

su

MBR, uBoot and kernel

Write mbr+uboot+kernel.gz to disk:

gzip -dc /full/path/to/mbr+uboot+kernel.gz | dd of=/dev/sdb

(when using sudo for root things, this should be

gzip -dc /full/path/to/mbr+uboot+kernel.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb

)

Change data partition size

Use fdisk to remove partition 2, and add it again. Primary partition. (your disk will have a different size than the mbr donor).
fdisk is started by:

fdisk /dev/sdb

and use ‘m’ to get further help.
Change the partitiontype of partition 2 to fd.
Write partitiontable and exit fdisk.

For the lazy people, the exact keystrokes in fdisk are:

System partition

Format partition 1:

mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1

Create a mountpoint, and mount partition 1:

mkdir /tmp/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/sdb1

Install the rootfs:

cd /tmp/sdb1
tar -xzf /full/path/to/sda1-2064.tgz

The last command might give a lot of errors about unresolved symlinks in /etc/ssl/. This is normal. The symlinks point to files which really don’t exist

Data partition

Format partition 2:

mkfs -t xfs /dev/sdb2

It is possible that you have to install xfsprogs first. On Ubuntu or Debian:

apt-get install xfsprogs

Some people have reported problems with formatting partition2 using mkfs. This should work, and very quickly:

 mkfs.xfs -b <allocation block size> /dev/sdb2

where block size = 512 to 4096. With lots of small files, using smaller allocation-block size will waste less space at the expense of performance. Although we’re really limited by the slow SATA controller and NIC in this box anyway.

Ready

When you put this disk in your Home Media, it should work.

On a Home Media the MAC address is stored on the disk. For this disk image it’s 00:d0:b8:09:68:1e. If you want to change it, you’ll have to edit /etc/modules.