Extroot lost after upgrade! - TP-Link WDR4300

from rc2 ot latest 18.06 sys upgrade, I lost my extroot config and no more want to recognise the exroot usb

That is to be expected, every time and not a bug.

neve have this before since chaos calmer, upgraded to lede and keep loading the exroot without issue on both 1043nd and 4300.

So now, can someone please guide me for how to reinitiate loading the existing exroot.

already tried the fstab with no success

Binaries stored on an old extroot are linked against different library ABIs (sonames), you can't mix them with newer or older releases. In the very specific case of 18.06.0-rc2 --> 18.06.0 it might be compatible, but that's purely by chance - 17.01.x --> 18.06.0 or any other bump spanning more than a couple of weeks will definately fail. Therefore the sysupgrade process will intentionally disable existing extroots - and you will have to redo them.

ok, thats the role of backups file :wink:

thank you.
I will redo.
always document my mods
was 18.06.0-rc2 to 18.06.0

so was a very big chance from chaos calmer to lede

thank you very much for clarification

The problem is that the backup does not see the extroot configuration on flash, since it is shadowed by the configuration on the external disk. So it will not include the configuration file enabling the external disk, but the one on the external disk.

" So it will not include the configuration file enabling the external disk, but the one on the external disk."

what you mean exactly ? hard for me to follow here

When the system boots, it mounts the two flash file systems, the "ROM" on root, and the internal r/w flash "on top" of the ROM, with what's called an "overlay" file system. With an overlay file system, when you ask to read a file, if it exists on the overlay, you get that version; if not, you get the underlying (ROM) version. That flash file system has instructions in it that effectively say "when you get to this point in the boot, mount the external file system as an overlay." So the result is that the "extroot" file system "hides" those instructions. Since they're hidden with the "new" files, the sysupgrade process doesn't "see" them, so they aren't copied over.

See https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/additional-software/extroot_configuration for more details.

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thank you jeff