jffs partitions on nvram blown away. How to rebuild new partition.

[Darrin Reed]

How can I recreate the asus partition and delete bad blocks in the brcmnand partition. Can someone please help?. I believe as good as merlins firmware is, I think he should have a restore jffs partition option to rebuild broken partitions. I have a brand new rt-ac88u router that I cant claim warranty because of this.. With no mounted jffs my router is useless. How my router got into this state was because I followed merlins guide for entware. It failed to install and caused this problem. My rt-ac88u is missing the asus partition and needs to be rebuilt. Surely someone would know here. I am sure that I am not alone in this. No firmware flashes restore the firmware. Even drt-wrt firmware wont restore the jffs partitions. I have tried everything.

ASUSWRT-Merlin RT-AC68U_3.0.0.4 Sun Mar 20 19:52:23 UTC 2016
dmreed@RT-AC68U-EC48:/tmp/home/root# cat /proc/mtd
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00080000 00020000 "boot"
mtd1: 00180000 00020000 "nvram"
mtd2: 03e00000 00020000 "linux"
mtd3: 03c65140 00020000 "rootfs"
mtd4: 03ec0000 00020000 "brcmnand"
mtd5: 00140000 00020000 "asus"

ASUSWRT-Merlin RT-AC88U_3.0.0.4 Sun Mar 20 19:54:30 UTC 2016
dmreed@RT-AC88U-9F70:/tmp/home/root# cat /proc/mtd
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00080000 00020000 "boot"
mtd1: 00180000 00020000 "nvram"
mtd2: 03e00000 00020000 "linux"
mtd3: 03c4c0a4 00020000 "rootfs"
mtd4: 04000000 00020000 "brcmnand"

 

[mstombs]

Very strange, Entware installation only touches a couple of tiny files on /jffs, or did you try to install all to /jffs instead of the expected usb stick? Why mention bad-blocks? Flash chips can have bad blocks, all software controllers can do is work around them. Did you try to enable something writing every second to flash? If so 400,000 seconds isn't long, I am not a fan of Asus storing some logs and traffic history on jffs, but it isn't continuous and syslog storage code was broken when I last looked . Flash does have a finite life and and an external usb stick much easier to replace when worn out!
Latest firmware doesn't re-init the jffs to preserve settings/configs across upgrades on ARM routers.
Suggest you try using the asus recovery web console to erase nvram and load/ boot/ check all official firmware for your specific model, in order oldest to newest, ISTR there was a version that included a reorganisation of the flash?

 

[sfx2000]

Alternate would be a TFTP update/install, as it'll use the low level boot loader to bootstrap the bricked device.

 

[RMerlin]

There's no asus partition on the RT-AC88U.

The JFFS filesystem is mounted on top of the brcmnand partition.

 

[Darrin Reed]

Very strange, Entware installation only touches a couple of tiny files on /jffs, or did you try to install all to /jffs instead of the expected usb stick? Why mention bad-blocks? Flash chips can have bad blocks, all software controllers can do is work around them. Did you try to enable something writing every second to flash? If so 400,000 seconds isn't long, I am not a fan of Asus storing some logs and traffic history on jffs, but it isn't continuous and syslog storage code was broken when I last looked . Flash does have a finite life and and an external usb stick much easier to replace when worn out!
Latest firmware doesn't re-init the jffs to preserve settings/configs across upgrades on ARM routers.
Suggest you try using the asus recovery web console to erase nvram and load/ boot/ check all official firmware for your specific model, in order oldest to newest, ISTR there was a version that included a reorganisation of the flash?

I don't know what i did. I just followed merlins guide. It came back with errors, "can't find specified path or files". I tried a number of times. I wanted transmission on there for hdd spin down , but it wouldn't install. Then I tried optware and that is where I had the jffs mount issue with merlin's firmware came in. After selecting the format option and reboot. I worked again fine once. Then with other try to install optware the jffs was gone for good.
I tried everything. Every firmware version official and merlins based ones. I even tried to put drt-wrt firmware on there but it wouldn't boot. I must have got a bad flash from the word go. My rt-ac68u revived from the above well, but not the 88u.
I though that you could just cd into the jffs and revive it. I didn't think that it would be like this. There should be a program to restore the jffs, as I think I won't be alone in this. All I wanted to know is how to get around the input/output errors when I try to erase it. Thanks for your help.

 

[Francis Horan]

I tried restoring a few entware-ng.tar.gz backups along with jffs_backup.tar.gz and it doesn't seem to be possible. Well entware-ng will extract but jffs_backup.tar.gz, how do you restore that when the file system is read-only? Have to copy and paste stuff from file to file while editing each file in /jffs/ and then still doesn't work when you reboot everything... Would be nice if there was an easy way to restore a working entware-ng and jffs install coz currently it seems like everything needs to be reinstalled from scratch when things go wrong...

 

[ColinTaylor]

but jffs_backup.tar.gz, how do you restore that when the file system is read-only?

You can't. There is nothing special/different about restoring the contents of /jffs assuming it's been mounted r/w. If your /jffs is read-only then you've got an issue with your router not the restore process.