A5-V11 ramips rt-305x flash not detected?

Hello to everyone. I have a very strange issue with an A5-V11 bought by a friend to use it as a print server with OpenWrt and P910nd. I know it has only 4Mb flash, bad WiFi coverage, phantom ethernet ports drawing power, a mess overall but it does the job and it costs almost nothing!
I had done something similar with another one years ago so I already knew what to do but maybe it wasn't that simple... :frowning:
The flashing procedure has gone absolutely fine and OpenWrt boots successfully. The issue is that /overlay is mounted on /tmp/root like if the flash isn't detected. It didn't happen to me and I know that there are many clones of this very cheap (therefore low quality) device so probably the flash used is another one, maybe unsopported. The problem is that this way any added package or configuration goes on the RAM and is lost after a reboot, completely useless.
The even more strange thing was that flashing the firmware found at post #14 here instead (a modded version for a 16Mb flash), the A5-V11 works as expected with /overlay correctly mounted where it should. The problem is that it is an ancient Barrier Breaker!
Is there any check I could do to understand what's going on? Thanks in advance for your replies and a nice day to everyone! :slight_smile:

The jffs2 will not initialize if there are fewer than 5 free 64k blocks in flash. Generally you need a custom build to realize this with 4M flash.

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Hi and thanks for your follow-up. Indeed I had custom built an OpenWrt 18.06.4 image with just the minimum needed (not even Luci) for mine and I've tried to use the same one with my friend's but I've got the described result. Maybe the flash isn't the same but shouldn't it be still 4Mb, 4096Kb and so on? That's very strange. Probably my friend's one has a bad quality flash with some Kbs missing because of production fault, let's say a second (if not third) choice one.
The Barrier Breaker image which works, instead, is more than 500Kb smaller so it makes absolutely sense. I would try to build something smaller. Thanks! :slight_smile:

I've just built a 19.07.7 image with almost nothing, the bare bare minimum. It is even smaller than the Barrier Breaker one and I can confirm that the issue was size as mk24 was correctly saying. I've marked his reply as the solution to my request so the thread is solved. Thanks! :slight_smile:

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