Mounting corrupt USB Thumb-drive causes Kernel Panic

[JDB]

So I decided to update from 380.68 to 380.68_2 - router didn't come back up.

Do a power off/on - not wildly unusual to need to do this after firmware update.

Notice it's booting, staying up for 30 seconds and then crashing, and loops like this forever. If I ethernet in I have just enough time to log in to the GUI before it crashes.

So now I'm thinking the firmware was corrupt and I'm gonna have to go to recover mode - yay!

Unplugged everything one by one, LAN ports, WAN port, USB - ha! USB is the killer.

Now it's stable with no USB drive connected I roll back to 380.68 - same issue.

Read the log and it claims it cannot read one of the blocks.

Tried to mount the USB on Mac, not happy, tried on Linux, also not happy (and complains about the same block the router did). So now I know my USB stick is trashed, gonna have to work out how to restore entware - yay!

So the point of this was to report the kernel panic, I figure it probably shouldn't crash the router if a corrupt USB stick is connected!!

Logs here extracted from my Syslog server;
https://pastebin.com/xGuEznND

 

[doczenith1]

It is my understanding that it is recommended to remove flash drives when updating firmware. I can't remember the exact reason why though. I'm sure someone will chime in with the reason.

 

[JDB]

It is my understanding that it is recommended to remove flash drives when updating firmware. I can't remember the exact reason why though. I'm sure someone will chime in with the reason.

Thanks for the tip, I guess I'll do that from now on to try and prevent bricking another drive. Still the kernel panic shouldn't happen regardless though.

 

[thelonelycoder]

It is my understanding that it is recommended to remove flash drives when updating firmware. I can't remember the exact reason why though. I'm sure someone will chime in with the reason.

Momory, RAM is not abundantly available and a firmware update needs some room to maneuver during the update.
And also the reason why OP posted.
Better save than sorry when updating --> Make backups of settings and /jffs/ as well.