Could an alternate OS be installed on the AS4004T?

[tensiondriven]

Hola, curious if based on your experience you think an alternate os like FreeNAS/Unraid/OMV could be installed on a AS4004T - It doesn't have an internal flash boot drive, uses AArch64 Processor, and as far as I know, the 2GB RAM is not upgradable.

[mafredri]

Hi. I think it's possible, but not without some exploration. I'm guessing it uses Marvell u-boot, like the AS1002T. Unfortunately, I never got very far in running a custom Linux on AS1002T due to the use of a bad serial adapter which fried the serial port 😔.

One thing that you could try just for the sake of it is to put a bootable USB and hold the button on the front panel while booting. If you're lucky, that could instruct the machine to boot from the USB. It does on x86 architecture anyway.

But whatever you attempt, connecting to the serial port would help a lot. It's too bad ASUSTOR doesn't give us easy access to it.

I couldn't find any logs that I'd have stored either, only this one lousy picture:

[tensiondriven]

Well how nice of them to include some ASCII art in the boot loader.

Thanks very much for the tip. Forgive me if this is a little ignorant of a question, but when I try using a bootable USB, what image should I use? Any ARM-based distro of anything, such as Raspian, or something more specific?

[mafredri]

Unfortunately I have very little understanding of how u-boot works, so I can't really say what would work or even what to expect. But perhaps rather than something specific like Raspbian, I'd recommend trying out generic Armbian https://www.armbian.com/uefi-arm64/

Other than that, you might want to check how other systems deal with u-boot and booting from USB -- if it's even possible without running custom commands in the u-boot or UEFI shell.

[tensiondriven]

👍

[tensiondriven]

I recently decommissioned my AS4004T, so I'm in a good place to brick^H^H^H^H^Htry this now.