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derrick thomas avatar image
derrick thomas asked

Recovery option for cerbo gx

Having just experienced a 'bricked' cerbo gx myself and searching the forum and the interwebs for direction, it seems this problem is more common than you would think. Most Linux based devices such as routers, android cell phones and tablets etc. have ways for the end user to recover from a catastrophic failure without much effort, or requiring them to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair. The cerbo does have a button onboard which seems to be for the sole purpose of network reset and enable/disable. Would it be at all possible for victron to incorporate this button to be able to swap the boot partition, to be able to recover from a firmware update failure or other similar situation resulting in a failure to boot? For example my router runs openwrt firmware (Linux based) and it does exactly that. Hold the button while connecting power to the unit and it swaps boot partition. It used the same method as the cerbo when doing firmware updates, it installs the update on a second partition then swaps boot.

I don't know if the way the hardware is setup inside the cerbo would allow this but it's something victron might want to give some thought to. It seems like it would prevent a lot of warranty returns not to mention a lot of headaches for the end user.

@Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) @mvader (Victron Energy)

cerbo gxfirmware update
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bathnm avatar image
bathnm answered ·

@derrick Thomas You have not shared what happened to brick it, but it is not that often and fairly hard to do for the majority of users.

A search of the web returns these two documents which can help

This link if you scroll down gives you directions on how to get a serial console. This will allow you too switch boot partitions.

Depending on what you did, this might also work

There is also a way of completely re-imaging the device from an sd-card and standard image file on the Victron firmware download site. However this is more tricky and I can't find the link.

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derrick thomas avatar image derrick thomas commented ·
Yes I did find the documentation on how to connect to the serial console, but unfortunately after much searching I have not been able to find how to switch the boot partition. Unfortunately factory reset is not an option as that method does require the unit to be able to boot, which it does not do.
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