[conspire] De-bricking a Linux wireless router

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:24:58 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Elliott Mitchell <ehem at m5p.com>
Subject: Re: ARM Help?
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Elliott Mitchell (ehem at m5p.com):

> Not exactly within your advertised domain, but is there likely to be
> folks in attendance who would know about de-bricking a WRT350N? Haven't
> managed to get it into TFTP mode.
> 
> (grr, OpenWRT folks, don't setup a directory/fileset for something you
> don't actually support!)

Well, I've never had to deal with that problem, lucky for me.  However,
I found the follow narrative from a DD-WRT user who claimed this routine 
got him/her into TFTP mode:


  I'll try and throw out a helping hand. I think you already did most of
  this, but this is the exact method I used.

  I recently had a similar problem with my WR850g router while I was
  trying to flash it to the newest DD-WRT firmware and basically spent an
  afternoon trying to unbrick my router.

  The first thing I did was statically assign myself an IP address. For
  example since you have a linksys router manually set your IP address to
  something like 192.168.1.5, set the default gateway to 192.168.1.1,
  subnet mask 255.255.255.0. Ignore the DNS for now.

  Now, once you have a statically assigned IP address do the following:

  1) Unplug the power cord from your router and wait about a minute
  2) Open up a DOS window and type "ping -t 192.168.1.1" which will
  continuously ping the router (expect it to say hardware failure, and
  other errors during this time)
  3) While holding down the reset button plug the power cord back in, but
  hold the reset button down for a good 5 seconds. You should get 1-10
  successful pings before it fails. Repeat this step a few times so you
  get the timing right.
  4) Once you get the timing right download the newest firmware from
  linksys and open up another DOS window and type the following command
  "tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT code.bin code.bin"
  5) Repeat step 4 several times. It took me about 7 tries, 6 failures
  before it successfully loaded.

Here's a discussion thread on OpenWRT:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=14105


The fallback is said to be a lot of hard slogging via serial console.
As you probably already know, here's the basic advice on the topic
as a whole from OpenWRT:

http://nuwiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting


----- End forwarded message -----