I installed OpenWRT 18.06 on a RavPower RP-WD03 and successfully configured WiFi and extroot on a 1GB SD card. Everything seemed fine after multiple reboots/power-cycling. I was trying to trap power button presses to see if I could graceful unmount the SD card before the RP-WD03 shutdown but had no success. The RP-WD03 has a reset button, which I thought only worked during boot. Pressing the reset button while OpenWRT was running was recorded in the log but forced a jffs2reset.
Fri Aug 17 11:12:06 2018 daemon.info jffs2reset: /dev/mtdblock6 is not mounted
Fri Aug 17 11:12:06 2018 user.notice root: the button was reset and the action was released
Fri Aug 17 11:12:06 2018 daemon.info jffs2reset: /dev/mtdblock6 will be erased on next mount
Fri Aug 17 11:12:06 2018 daemon.info procd: - shutdown -
I reconnected via Ethernet. The root password I had set earlier was still valid, but everything else had to be reconfigured. I also had no access to the SD card. I rebooted and lost all the configuration changes. There are posts about the overlay not being written to flash, but the RP-WD03 has 8MB of flash and it looks like overlay (mtdblock6) has sufficient space.
root@OpenWrt:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 2560 2560 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 13980 396 13584 3% /tmp
tmpfs 13980 48 13932 0% /tmp/root
tmpfs 512 0 512 0% /dev
/dev/mtdblock6 4080 1868 2212 46% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 4080 1868 2212 46% /
The other odd thing is that I had previously had to install block-mount, kmod-usb-storage, and kmod-fs-ext4 to gain access to the SD card. When I tried to re-install them, OpenWRT indicated that they were already installed. opkg remove/install of the three packages 'fixed' that problem - I was even able to manually mount the SD card on /overlay. However, a power-cycle wiped out all the changes again. I did see "mount_root: jffs2 not ready yet, using temporary tmpfs overlay" and later "overlayfs: upper fs does not support tmpfile." in dmesg but am not sure if they were there before.
I have tried a soft and hard factory reset but do not think anything is happening:
root@OpenWrt:/# umount /overlay
root@OpenWrt:/etc/config# jffs2reset && reboot
This will erase all settings and remove any installed packages. Are you sure? [N/y]
y
/dev/mtdblock6 is not mounted
/dev/mtdblock6 will be erased on next mount
My guess is that the mtdblock6 overlay partition was somehow corrupted by the reset. Is my next step a firmware update to reflash OpenWRT 18.06 on the RP-WD03? I assume I can do that through LuCi (I originally upgraded the RP-WD03 stock firmware to OpenWRT via tftp).
Thanks, Norbert