Custom u-boot build, can I avoid "bad CRC, using default environment"?

For Developers
1

I am working on a build for a Seagate blackarmor nas220. The stock bootloader is an old version of u-boot

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Aug 17 2009 - 10:16:51) Marvell version: 3.4.14

That does not support UBI which as far as I can tell is needed on this NAND device to run openwrt. I have patched u-boot to match the flash partitions I'd like for openwrt and have u-boot and an early version of openwrt running at this point.

When the newer build of u-boot runs the first time I got

U-Boot 2020.07-rc4-00063-g0b3a92dfa3-dirty (Jun 19 2020 - 00:24:44 +0000)
NAS 220

SoC:   Kirkwood 88F6281_A0
DRAM:  128 MiB
NAND:  32 MiB
Loading Environment from NAND... *** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

This results in u-boot setting env based on whatever I compiled in. The trick is it can't see the MAC addr which is in the u-boot environment partition. This means the MAC has to be manually set in u-boot environments to get networking. Ideally I like to keep all the original u-boot env values if I can. Is there anyway to have the new u-boot read the existing parition without a CRC failure?

2 
cd ./UBOOTSRC
fgrep -r 'CONFIG_CMD_CRC32' .
fgrep -r 'CONFIG_CRC32_VERIFY' .
################################
CONFIG_ENV_IS_IN_UBI=y
CONFIG_ENV_UBI_PART="UBI"
CONFIG_ENV_UBI_VOLUME="xyz"
3

Thanks for the hints wulfy. I'll research and try these.