{"id":245,"date":"2014-11-30T12:38:30","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T03:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2022-04-03T13:48:55","modified_gmt":"2022-04-03T04:48:55","slug":"trying-to-unbrick-my-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/2014\/11\/trying-to-unbrick-my-router\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying to unbrick my router"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Then I decided to flash the router manually with mtd.<\/p>\n

I downloaded OpenWRT squashfs release and flashed it. But since then the router didn’t boot up.<\/p>\n

I had to disassemble it in order to repair it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"DSC_0550\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyway I opened it up.<\/p>\n

According to the OpenWRT wiki there are serial ports located at the top<\/p>\n

\"DSC_0561\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I soldered it.<\/p>\n

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

I tried:<\/p>\n

1. OpenWRT image from the wiki
\n2. Unencrypted original firmware
\n3. taking a full mtd dump from another router and writing it to this router<\/p>\n

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

Everything fails with “Bad magic number” message.<\/p>\n

I guess something is seriously wrong with my u-boot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Trying to unbrick my router<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[68,66,67,69,70],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer","tag-buffalo","tag-dd-wrt","tag-openwrt","tag-router","tag-serial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":251,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manatails.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}