I bought a Netgear Orbi SRR60 on eBay and flashed OpenWRT 24.10.0 to it without too much trouble.
However, before buying the device, I had understood from Google that it had 4Gb emmc storage, which I had imagined would allow me to install bucket loads of additional packages with space left over. This Wiki page says it has 4Gb emmc storage:
However, after installing OpenWRT, the Status > Overview page seems to indicate it has less than 25Mb of disk space available.
Does it have 4Gb emmc storage? If so, how do I see/use it? I had thought I would have plenty space to install the AdGuard Home package and a few other bits, but it seems not?
One other thing - I had to install the 24.10.0 factory image and then the sysupgrade image to 24.10.2. It didnât seem to accept the 24.10.2 factory image. Is this a known thing or perhaps I screwed something up somewhere (its not a dual-boot device) ?
it does - https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=2cb24b3f3cd89692f3c0bd137f3f560ada359bfa.
openwrt doesnât repartition the storage to maximize space, try fdisk to check the default layout.
if using owut, see if youâre missing fitblk is perhaps missing, it's an issue with other devices.
Cool - how do I use it?? Is the information in the Status > Overview just wrong and I can ignore it and go ahead and add AdGuard Home etc without any issues?
Whats owut ? Iâll Google fitblk
Oh, owut = OpenWRT Upgrade Tool. No, i didnt use that. I just flashed the 24.10.2 factory image from the Luci front end when it was running 24.10.0 - that didnt seem to work as it was still on 24.10.0 when it rebooted. So then I tried the sysupgrade image to get to 24.10.2
Another thing about this device - the Wiki says:
1733 Mbps - 4SS 5GHz 802.11ac (80MHz chan.) backhaul,
for radio0, but when I look in radio0 in Luci, it defaults to Ch.100. I had understood that its best to use the radio that defaults to Ch.36 as a 5Ghz âbackhaulâ (presumably the lower frequency should give better signal levels). All my other OpenWRT routers I have used the radio with Ch.36 as the âbackhaulâ. Would it be better to use the Ch.100 radio as 5Ghz backhaul and free up the lower Ch.36 as normal 5Ghz WiFi access point SSID?
bad example but here it comes anyway, the SAX1V1K have an 8GB eMMC, with the standard install you get approx 500MB flash space, but there's another 4.5GB free space at the end of the eMMC, unallocated.
by default, OpenWRT won't touch it.
always better to have non-overlapping wifi chans, unless STA and AP are using the same radio, then it can't be done like that.
Okay, so how do I âexpandâ the partition to the full 4Gb emmc? If it were a microSD card iâd take it out and put it in my laptop and use some partition editor to resize it, but how do you do it with a router with built in emmc?
you can't expand it, then you'd most likely have to create a custom image, using your custom eMMC layout.
but if there's an empty partition, you could try to use it.
in the case of the SAX1V1K, the eMMC might be signed, and repartitioning is highly discouraged, it could brick your device.
you might end up in the same situation.
if don't know what you're doing, stay away.
Ok, so iâm familiar with using the OpenWRT firmware selector to make a custom image, but how do I use it to specify a custom emmc layout??
can't, you have to alter the DTS file, describing the layout of the flash, and compile your own custom OpenWRT image.
Would these instructions not work on the Netgear Orbi SRR60:
They'd would brick your device.
If I have understood correctly, the Netgear SRR60 has a system partition which is just 32Mb in size, but it has 4Gb of unused space (but no 'safe' way to expand the relevant partition to utilise that 4Gb of space).
In my case, i had wanted to setup OpenWRT & install Adguard Home in the 4Gb of space.
So what would happen if I used the OpenWRT firmware selector to create a factory img with all my packages, including AdGuard Home, and then tried flashing it - would the flashing process simply increase the partition size to get everything in, or would it fail to flash because the img doesn't fit in the default partition of just 32Mb ??
It should fail to build once it outgrew the available default flash space.
So this appears to be the partition details for my Netgear Orbi SRR60:
root@Orbi:/etc/config# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 6.8M 6.8M 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 247.5M 1.3M 246.2M 1% /tmp
/dev/loop0 21.1M 3.2M 16.2M 17% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 21.1M 3.2M 16.2M 17% /
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
root@Orbi:/etc/config# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 24.06 MiB, 25231360 bytes, 49280 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3.53 GiB, 3791650816 bytes, 7405568 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 98101B32-BBE2-4BF2-A06E-2BB33D000C20
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1 34 1057 1024 512K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p2 1058 2081 1024 512K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p3 2082 3105 1024 512K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p4 3106 4129 1024 512K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p5 4130 4641 512 256K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p6 4642 5153 512 256K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p7 5154 6177 1024 512K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p8 6178 6689 512 256K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p9 6690 8737 2048 1M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p10 8738 10785 2048 1M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p11 10786 11297 512 256K unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p12 11298 27681 16384 8M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p13 27682 44065 16384 8M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p14 44066 175137 131072 64M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p15 175138 306209 131072 64M unknown
/dev/mmcblk0p16 306210 2927649 2621440 1.3G unknown
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0: 2 MiB, 2097152 bytes, 4096 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1: 2 MiB, 2097152 bytes, 4096 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
root@Orbi:/etc/config# block info
/dev/loop0: UUID="e1adf5f3-a74f-4d56-82a9-b28bd09558bb" LABEL="rootfs_data" VERSION="1.0" MOUNT="/overlay" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mmcblk0p20: UUID="aa2b2f49-3f85558e-7bd27160-2fca72df" VERSION="4.0" MOUNT="/rom" TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/mmcblk0p27: UUID="2aa082a5-83be-45ad-abb3-807275eac72b" VERSION="1.0" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mmcblk0p28: UUID="ddc37075-ad98-4b5b-9db1-b546addb1e6b" VERSION="1.0" TYPE="ext4"
Can anyone advise how I can safely resize my system into the remainder of the unallocated 4Gb emmc space to allow additional space to install more packages?
I dont know what the /dev/mmcblk0p16 partition is which seems to be 1.3Gb in size??
root@Orbi:~# parted -l
Error: /dev/mmcblk0boot0: unrecognised disk label
Model: Generic SD/MMC Storage Card (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0: 2097kB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:
Error: /dev/mmcblk0boot1: unrecognised disk label
Model: Generic SD/MMC Storage Card (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1: 2097kB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:
Model: MMC M62704 (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3792MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 17.4kB 542kB 524kB 0:SBL1
2 542kB 1066kB 524kB 0:BOOTCONFIG
3 1066kB 1590kB 524kB 0:QSEE
4 1590kB 2115kB 524kB 0:QSEE_1
5 2115kB 2377kB 262kB 0:CDT
6 2377kB 2639kB 262kB 0:CDT_1
7 2639kB 3163kB 524kB 0:BOOTCONFIG1
8 3163kB 3425kB 262kB 0:APPSBLENV
9 3425kB 4474kB 1049kB 0:APPSBL
10 4474kB 5522kB 1049kB 0:APPSBL_111 5522kB 5785kB 262kB 0:ART
12 5785kB 14.2MB 8389kB 0:HLOS
13 14.2MB 22.6MB 8389kB 0:HLOS_1
14 22.6MB 89.7MB 67.1MB rootfs
15 89.7MB 157MB 67.1MB rootfs_1
16 157MB 1499MB 1342MB rootfs_data
root@Orbi:~#
I'm at a loss here.
I tried to run the OpenWRT 'automated' scripts for resizing the root partition, which just completed with something like âno such partitionâ, rebooted & nothing was any different.
If I use cfdisk /dev/mmcblk0 and try to create a new partition in the available freespace, it seemingly does nothing & after rebooting, nothing is any different.
If I use parted and try to mkpart it tells me âtoo many primary partitionsâ. Even if I try mkpart extended it seems to ignore the 'extended' & still reports âtoo many primary partitionsâ
So I don't know how to expand the existing partition for OpenWRT packages & I don't know how to create a new partition on the emmc which could be used for the /overlay which (I think) would then make it possible to increase the available space for packages.
Nobody has a solution?
UPDATE: So, if I understand Google correctly, it's telling me that a GPT partition table can only have 'primary' partitions & presumably the existing GPT partition table already has used all the available primary partitions possible (only 4 primary partitions allowed I think?). So I think that means it's impossible to create a new partition in the available free-space, so the only option is to expand the size of the existing partition (which I think is the /overlay partition?) and it seems that's a complicated process of building a new image. So, in the end, that would appear to make the Netgear Orbi SRR60 kinda useless for anything other than basic OpenWRT packages. Back to eBay 
You obviously haven't tried mounting (in read only) mmcblk0p16, to see what it contains ?
1.3GB is a lot of extroot.
No, haven't tried to do that, because I don't know how to.
Is the 1.3Gb âextrootâ? I thought it was ârootfs_dataâ whatever that is?
I'm sure Google knows.
It is (hopefully) nothing, meaning it can be made extroot.