QNAP TS-212, Debian stuck in Initramfs

[iblackford]

Hi All, 

 

I'm a bit of a Debian newbie, I haven't had much experience troubleshooting linux installations, so please bear with me. I was able to follow Martin Michlmayr's instructions for installing Debian 10 on my TS-212. The TS-212 uses a Marvell ARM CPU, 256MB of ram, 16MB of SPI NOR flash. I also followed the instructions to resize the MTD blocks to make room for the Debian 11 kernel, although i never updated the kernel. 

 

Everything was working fine until I booted one day and I got flashing red lights on the front of the NAS. I hooked up to the debug serial port, and I find that the hard drive has all kinds of non-recoverable errors, and Debian won't boot. It kicks me out into Initramfs. 

 

I think I can mount a hard drive in initramfs. I have another linux system that I can use to prepare a hard drive formatted as ext4, having whatever files I need on it. How can I install debian fresh again now, from initramfs? Is it possible for me to upgrade to Debian 11 at the same time? Are there any guides that might assist me with this? 

 

Thanks, Ivan

[Werner]

moved to offtopic since neither a board/device Armbian has ever seen nor related to Armbian at all.