About six months ago my trusted Linkstation Live had enough, since late 2008 it has been running without a hitch. The device started blinking red and rebooting it had the nice clicking sound of a broken hard drive.

Nothing was recoverable from the drive so I had to start from scratch, first I went to the local computer store and bought myself an Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drive.

To get it up and running I had to go trough several pages and try some of the tips from one page and some from another. That’s why I decided to put together my own survival-guide here so I can find it the next time this thing goes south. This quick and dirty howto is for the LS-CHL only!!!

So here it goes:

1. Download the TFTP recovery software from ftp://24.153.165.234/array1/share/nas-recovery/ , if you have the LS-CHL device it’s the TFTP Boot Recovery LS-CHL 1.06 you want.

2. Download the latest firmware from Buffalo, the version 1.07 should be the latest one since they don’t develop it anymore.

3. Disassemble the device, here is a picture of the open device http://www.yamasita.jp/linkstation/2009/09/090912_4l.jpg

4. Next you need a computer running Windows XP, I tried Windows 7 but could not get it to work.

5. Insert the new hard-drive into the Linkstation, you should not partition it. Just put it in.

6. Shut down any firewall service on your Windows XP and set your local IP to 192.168.11.1 and subnet 255.255.255.0. The Linkstation should use 192.168.11.150 once in emergency mode.

7. Unpack the TFTP boot recovery file. And start TFTP Boot.exe file. This should fire up a commandprompt. Look for the line Listening on: 192.168.11.1:69, if it’s there everything should go smoothly from now on.

8. Start the Linkstation and wait for the red light to start flashing, now press the function key for a few seconds and release. The light should turn blue and in your command prompt window you should see the transfer starting.

9. Once the transfer is done start NasNavi.exe to see if your computer can find the device. If it can you can now set your computer to get it’s IP automatically and unpack the Buffalo stock firmware.

10. When you have unpacked the firmware edit the LSUpdater.ini, in the end add

[specialflags]

debug = 1

11. Save and close the LSUpdater.ini file

12. Start the LSUpdater.exe and right click the rings in the upper left corner. Select Debug.

13. Enable all options on the right side of the window and press ok.

14. Start the update.

Wait for a while, quite a while actually and you should have your stock Linkstation Live back. Mine set the language to Japanese but it’s really easy to find the language settings even in Japanese

If you can’t follow this try googling especially from nas-central.org, this is purely a note for myself in case I ever need to do this again.

No related posts.