One of my Buffalo brand routers has been behaving strangely these days. I suspected a bug in the DD-WRT firmware so I decided to update it.

But somehow it did not accept any of the firmware update files I gave. I tried all the recent revisions of DD-WRT, even tried a level of downgrading but still no luck.

Then I decided to flash the router manually with mtd.

I downloaded OpenWRT squashfs release and flashed it. But since then the router didn’t boot up.

I had to disassemble it in order to repair it.

The exact model name is WZR-HP-G450H. It had hexagonial screws but it didn’t matter to me as I do carry the screwdrivers for it.

Anyway I opened it up.

According to the OpenWRT wiki there are serial ports located at the top

I soldered it.

Then started minicom and tftpd. After numerous tries I found that my router only accepts firmware during initial boot, after printing the offeset message.

I tried:

1. OpenWRT image from the wiki
2. Unencrypted original firmware
3. taking a full mtd dump from another router and writing it to this router

But none of them worked so far, I also tried changing the region by altering environment variables but it didnt have any effect.

Everything fails with “Bad magic number” message.

I guess something is seriously wrong with my u-boot…