Alternative OS for MPW?

Hi Simba7,

How good are you with electronics? I believe there’s a uart port on the board but I’m more of a software guy so I can’t confirm…

I have a similar thread but it’s getting nowhere :frowning:

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Passport-Wireless/Anyway-to-recover-if-I-brick/td-p/862269

  1. /dev/sdb is a “hidden” partition on the disk. It’s using sectors at the end of the drive. Even if you hookup the disk to your computer and repartition it to use the whole disk, you will find that the drive has less sectors and /dev/sdb will show up with no partition.

2 & 4. I’m thinking it uses uboot and the 4 pins on the top side of the board (what I’m calling the side that faces away from hard disk) is a uart/serial.

  1. I haven’t tried it yet. I will try it later with an SD card… I do know that it supports ext3 (/dev/sdb1 filesystem) but the only formating tools on the device are

mkfs.bfs

mkfs.minix

Well, I’m officially compiling Gentoo on a MyPassport Wireless 1TB that I just picked up at OfficeMax (30% off… not bad).

I basically took that 4GB chunk, partitioned it into a 3GB root and 1GB swap, and formatted sda1 as one BIG temp drive. I initially had to repartition the hard drive, untar the stage3 tarball, chroot into that, then repartition sdb and mkfs.ext3 the sdb1 drive, along with mkswap on sdb2.

Anyway… I untar’d the tarball into sdb1, mounted specific areas, mounted portage via NFS, and chrooted into it without issues. It’s now compiling GCC 4.9.2, so that will take awhile.

So far, it’s running quite cool, even with the CPU at 100% for a few hours. This is rather impressive. I’m incredibly paranoid about touching the 128MB of Flash (one screw up and it’s over), so I’ll just be compiling for awhile until I install a stereo mini-jack for the serial port (like I did with a 3TB MyBook Live).

It also looks like this device is very well supported in Linux, so I might be able to install the latest 3.18 kernel as well. It’s only a single-core processor, so I’m not expecting blazing speed… but a portable wireless server can be quite useful (especially with Asterisk).

Also, it will not crash the whole thing if you mess with sda or sdb and reboot it. The primary OS is in the 128MB of Flash, so you should be fine as long as YOU DON’T TOUCH IT.

I’ll post more later.

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Congratulations, Simba7!

Waiting for news.

The narrowest point of MPW, as I noted using it, is speed of wireless read-write operations. Gigabytes of data, especially in thousands small files, copy to/from the disk too slow to use it effectively for such tasks.

What is your opinion, is it possible to fix it by soft or by solderer? As I saw, the wi-fi module in it is not changable.

You can’t swap out the WiFi module in this. Obviously, it would void the warranty, not to mention it’s not a module, but a component on an embedded board. It might support an OTG adapter and a USB WiFi or Ethernet stick, but I have to get Gentoo compiled first before I can test that.

What you can possibly do is make it do other tasks besides running as a wireless sharable hard drive. This is my goal.

I currently have my original 2TB MPW, and I bought another 2TB and a 1TB at an OfficeMax clearance (30% off). I decided to experiment on the 1TB. It’s still compiling GCC 4.9.2 at the moment, which I know takes quite awhile on a single core ARMv7 processor.

Yes, I see.

By the way, what sort of tasks would you like to try?

Any update on your progress Simba7 or notes you care to share? :slight_smile:

I put it on hold for a little bit. I’ll probably get back on it in a few days.

I just had my original 2TB MPW’s battery fail on me (all bloated and stuff). It’s in another thread. Hopefully the same doesn’t happen with my other 2TB and my 1TB (that I’m building Gentoo on).

Hi guys,
Sorry to revive a relatively old thread - but this is the only discussion I’ve come across about enabling ext4 on the MyPassport Wireless, and that’s what I’d like to do. I was really surprised to find that the stock kernel doesn’t have built-in support.

So my understanding is that I basically have two options:

  1. Try to compile it as a module. (probably needing the existing stock kernel config files)
  2. Build a separate kernel with ext4 support to use instead of the stock kernel, but leave rest of system intact (feels like a can of worms - especially without a base kernel config to work off - but maybe possible)
  3. Install a new OS from scratch

Any thoughts on the feasibility of #1 or #2? And given the previous talk of installing Gentoo (i.e. doing #3), I’d love to hear about any success (or disaster) stories coming out of that?

Any and all pointers appreciated!

For context, I normally have the drive plugged into a Linux machine to use as (wired) NAS. I’ve found ext4 to be the best FS in terms of performance and reliability, so that’s what I’ve got the drive formatted as. But I also want the option to take the drive with me and access it wirelessly when I’m on the road - and assumed that the drive’s Linux firmware would be happy dealing with ext4…alas that doesn’t appear to be the case.

That’s freaking awesome man!

Hey, sorry for the long wait for a reply… I think that #1 would be your easiest option…

What have I’ve been doing? Well, I was waiting for a reply with the notes simba7 collected but seems that we may of lost him/her from the forums :frowning: I’ve been using my MPW to clear off my tiny camera that I had on my quad chopper but have been using as a dashcam. Due to this, I haven’t been “playing” with it. I recently got a MPWP (My Passport Wireless Pro) and will be starting to do some research into how it works while I keep using the old one like I’m currently doing. Once I get done playing with the MPWP, I may start using it like I’m currently using the old one and startup again on modifying the MPW since it’s done it’s moneys worth for me and if I brick it I won’t feel as lost :smiley:

Nope… Just been busy at work. :slight_smile:

I’m going to start working on my 1TB MPW once again. I probably will take it apart due to it being out of warranty. I did notice pins for TTL, which would be nice (install a stereo microjack for access).

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Yeah, once I’m done checking out the MPWP I think I will try soldering to it. The new one actually has a nice spot for it, Only stuck the pins in it and it makes enough of a connection that I can see what’s going on :slight_smile:

Hey People,

I’m Sorry to revive an old Thread, but maybe some of you are Interested:

Actually, a friend of mine just gave me his MPW (not Pro) to find out if the same thing i did with my MPWPro is possible there too. I found the TTL (UART) Port and don’t see any Reason why it should not work.

Although the Hardware Specs are a little Different, are already managed to get a minimum Debian Jessie (deBootstrap) working on the internal Flash.

As i have mentioned in the above linked Post, i am thinking about creating a Manual, including all the necessary files and tools, to get a regular Linux Distro working on the MPW and MPWPro. So, right now i am trying to find out how much interest there is or would be.

In case some of you are interested, just let me know.

I would very much like to pursue this further. As you can read in my previous Post, especially the MPWPro turns into a little, battery Powered, Portable PC.

DeKu

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Do you know if it is possible to boot from SDcard ? and eventually load a custom OS from it ?

Is bootloader uboot or barebox ?

According to:
http://downloads.wdc.com/gpl/buildroot-GPL_1_01_09.tgz

./buildroot-GPL/.config

BR2_TARGET_UBOOT=y
BR2_TARGET_UBOOT_BOARDNAME=“am335x_evm”

@rzrfreefr

Yes, the Bootloader is U-Boot. Usually the Drivers for the SD-Controller are loaded as Modules which would than require you to create an initial Ramdrive i.o. to load theese Drivers.

I can confirm that you can “simply” recompile the Kernel with the necessary Drivers integrated. That way you can load your custom OS from the SD Card.

Different to the Pro Version the Passport Wireless has an internal Flash holding the Buildroot Custom Root Filesystem. But that Flash has a overall Size of 128 MB. And its holding the Bootloader, the Device-Tree-Files, the Kernel etc…, too. So there is not much Space to utilize for a custom OS.

Using an SD Card would be my Choice too.

Because, that’s exactly the way i went with the MPW Pro.

If you are curious, i can submit a captured Bootlog.

Regards

DeKu

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I am wondering about WD strategy regarding upstreaming code to mainline ?

First thing to do is try to get support of machine from upstream uboot ? but I am not sure uboot images could be loaded from sdcard ? if not this is a risky task isnt it ?

Getting the Board to load the Bootloader from SD is beyond my expertise. AFAIK it is preconfigured to load it from the internal Flash. Both the Passport Wireless and Passport Wireless Pro load it from Flash.

But the Drives have a very redundant System. They both have two U-Boot images in there Flash’s.

The second one is for Recovery purposes and loads a Kernel with an Initial Ramdrive, so that you can recover the System. You can start theese by pressing the Battery/Wifi Button while turning the drive on.

This InitRD is preconfigured to look for Firmware Files on the Hard Drive and or SD-Card or USB-Stick. If found it starts Flashing that FW.

I have to admit, that this Safety Net has saved my Bu** a dozen times when i started Customizing the Drive. At that time i didn’t even have Access to the UART Port.

I just finished attaching the 2,5mm Stereo Jack to the other Drive. I’ll upload some Pictures.

Greetz

DeKu

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Just a few Pics of my Mod’s to the Drives in order to Access the Serial Terminal of them.

http://www.kuru.at/IMG_4592.JPG

http://www.kuru.at/IMG_4597.JPG

http://www.kuru.at/IMG_4627.JPG

http://www.kuru.at/IMG_4633.JPG

Any news in the MPW custon OS development?

I am thinking a way to update wl18XX drivers, just because are the root cause of most tof the problems of the device. I think that almost the FW of the wl18XX drive could be updated, but it would be better to update whole kernel and drivers.

Any one interested on joining forces to update this little beauties?

AEL

Here I am againg just to put here my solution for the MPW WIFI connection drops.

My device is preconfigured for GB wifi domain, so I had to modify the hostapd.conf file and set the country to ES (Spain in may case). No problem since I changed it, but I dont know why, the MPW updates from time to time (not always) this param, so I added a sed command to restore it in the init script of the hostapd service.

I have also this problem with the WIFI password. The info for the connection is stored in two files, wifinetwork-remembered.conf and wifinetwork-params.conf, both located in the /etc/nas/config folder. Again, from time to time, the pass is replaced with the SSID.

So, again, the solution was to include two sed commands en the multirole init script to restore the pass before wifi network connection.

With these changes, my MPW is booted and connected to WIFI in less than 2 minutes each time I power on it.

Hope it helps other users!