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Damn did you type all of that or paste it lol. Great info for others looking but yeah you need to make sure it's stable out of failsafe then you should be good. If anything, you learned a lot about your router and it's operation.Ok I thank you for the assist. Slartybart too. I've repeated the same steps as 2 days ago and got the router working. This time I'm not rebooting it till I find a permanent solution. Am still on the openwrt firmware but at least its working.
For anybody else with a bricked router on openwrt, I'll sum up what worked for me:
Change ip settings in LAN properties (not sure if its a required step, but won't take much time): go to IPV4 settings, select "use the following ip address", enter 192.168.1.9 , subnet mask: clicking in that field should automatically generate 255.255.255.0 . Leave the rest unchanged.
Boot router in failsafe:
To do this, connect your PC to the WAN port of your router with an ethernet cable. Keep the "wifi" switch on your router off. Then plug in your router power cable. At boot, the one LED comes on first, and after a few seconds the 2nd LED does a slow blink. As soon as you see that happen, press the "Reset" button on your router. This will cause the LEDs to remain in fast blink. This indicates you have entered failsafe mode.
**Different routers enter failsafe in different ways. Mine is TL-WR841N v8. Google failsafe mode for your router. In some routers, you need to connect your PC to the LAN port or LAN 1 port instead of WAN port. Also you might have a different button instead of RESET.
Once in failsafe mode
Click on Start in windows, run the command prompt "cmd" or run "telnet". For the CMD window type telnet 192.168.1.1
For the telnet window type open 192.168.1.1
After this, regardless of whether you opened cmd or telnet, rest of the steps remain the same.
-Define a password by typing passwd hit Enter
- type your password hit enter
- retype password hit enter.
These 3 steps did not work for me. But in case you are able to work with it, great.
Next step Kill the Openwrt firmware by typing mtd -r erase rootfs_data
At this point your router will reboot and after a while if you are connected to the WAN port in step 1, you would unfortunately lose connection. Anyway, don't let that bother you. Go back to your LAN properties and select "Automatically assign Ip" option in your ipv4 settings. Replug your ethernet cable to your LAN port. Put in your internet cable into the LAN port. Type 192.168.1.1 in your browser, the user name (root) and password fields should autopopulate so just hit Log in. And then follow your regular ISP settings to set up your internet connection.
The issue I still face is if I restore a backup file or reboot my router, it gets bricked again. So i'm going to keep it powered on forever lol.
Also what works instead of the command mtd -r erase rootfs_data you can alternately enter firstboot and you are likely to see a message on the lines of "root erased"or something. Then type reboot -f and hit Enter. Rest remains the same.
METHOD 2: Involves using FTP (I couldn't get it to work for me, but its worked for others)
1. Go to control panel, click on programs, programs and features and on the left panel click on 'Turn windows features on or off'
2. Enable the following the press OK:
- Internet information services
- Click on the + next to Internet information services and ensure FTP Server is ticked, and also the folders within FTP Server
- Near the bottom of the list enable 'Telnet Client'
Press OK and these will install.
3. Download the firmware file you want to switch to, lets say in this case lets call the file "841nv8.bin"
4. Create a folder anywhere on your PC and call it something like 'sysupgrade', and put the file you downloaded above into it.
5. Set your computer with static address 192.168.1.9 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0
6. Go back into control panel, go to system and security, administrative tools, and double click on 'Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager'
7. On the left you should see your PC name, expand that and right click on 'sites' and 'add ftp site'.
Enter any name you like and for the physical path select the folder you created earlier with the sysupgrade file inside.
Click next and set the IP Address to 192.168.1.9
Press 'Allow SSL' and leave everything else the same and click next
Under Authentication select Anonymous, and Authorization to All Users with Read Permissions. Click finish
8. To test this connection, open a web browser and enter
ftp://192.168.1.9
You should see the file
9. Disable windows firewall (important step. your router may not find the sysupgrade file with firewall enabled).
Unplug the router power cable. Boot in Failsafe mode (refer to the description above in the First method)
To get this file to the router you need to telnet to the router:
Open command prompt and enter: telnet 192.168.1.1
then you enter
cd /tmp
To get the file into this directory enter:
wget http://192.168.1.9/wr841nv8.bin
then, we’re ready to upgrade
#go to /tmp directory
cd /tmp
#check firmware file integrity
md5sum openwrt-ar71xx-tl-wr1043nd-v1-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
#use sysupgrade to flash sysupgrade image. it's one line
sysupgrade -n wr841nv8.bin
Wait a few minutes. If successful, the router will reboot with the desired firmware.
If it doesn’t reboot, wait a few more minutes and repower the router, it should then allow access.
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