NSA325 flashing questions (1 reply)

Hello,

I bought a couple of 4TB WD disks for my NSA325, which I want to use in RAID 1 and decided that it's a good time to make the box more configurable by either installing a proper Linux distribution or something like Open Media Vault / OpenWRT. Essentially I'd like to have a web interface for common setup + SSH console and access to package repository for fine tuning. Recommendations about such interface are welcome.

As I understand, the first step for that is to upgrade U-Boot. I have some questions about this process.

1. If I upgrade U-Boot according to instruction, will it be possible to use manufacturer's system / interface as a backup option?
2. Where should new system be installed - USB flash drive or some HDD partition?
3. I have a bad block at NAND (Bad eraseblock 162 at 0x000001440000) - how problematic is it?
4. Considering the note from instruction:
   

   Quote
   bodhi
   Note: for boxes such as Pogo V4 and Zyxel NSA3xx, the mtd partition definition are kept the same as stock definition, therefore is different from the one above.

   - should I type "mtd1" everywhere instead of "mtd0"? The output of the appropriate commands from step 1 is below.

cat /etc/fw_env.config

# Configuration file for fw_(printenv/saveenv) utility.
# Up to two entries are valid, in this case the redundand
# environment sector is assumed present.
# Notice, that the "Number of sectors" is ignored on NOR.

# MTD device name       Device offset   Env. size       Flash sector size       Number of sectors
# NAND example
/dev/mtd1               0x0000          0x20000         0x20000                 4

cat /proc/mtd

dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00100000 00020000 "uboot"
mtd1: 00080000 00020000 "uboot_env"
mtd2: 00080000 00020000 "key_store"
mtd3: 00080000 00020000 "info"
mtd4: 00a00000 00020000 "etc"
mtd5: 00a00000 00020000 "kernel_1"
mtd6: 02fc0000 00020000 "rootfs1"
mtd7: 00a00000 00020000 "kernel_2"
mtd8: 02fc0000 00020000 "rootfs2"

Thanks in advance!