WL-500g Premium died After Upgrading Firmware

[acidbrain]

Hi folks!

It seems like i bricked my brand new Asus WL-500g deluxe while playing with OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC1.
I messed up the firewall rules and locked my self out.
I did "iptables -F", but the default policy for INPUT is DROP... sad

Unfortunately, rebooting the router did not make it accessible again.
I tried to reflash the firmware but tftp says Timeout.
The ASUS firmware utility doesn't help either.


Any ideas are welcome!

Edit: The router responds to arp request, but not to ping.

[acidbrain]

The people at the #openwrt channel told me how to do a proper reset.:
Removing power, wait 20 sec, put power back, wait 3 sec, push reset for 10 sec.
Then you should be able to telnet/ssh again.

It works, but all my configuration is lost

[sMiLe]

Hi there,

I recently flashed my wl-500gP with Olegs pre4 and it worked for a few minutes. I was just transfering data via samba onto the external harddisk when it passed out and did not respond anymore. I cannot enter the restoration mode, when I press the restore button and plug in AC it reacts just as if I not push the restore button at all. I read similar effects on other routers of the wl-500 series and also read something about pin 10. Is there a similar workaround for the 500gP?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanx in advance
sMiLe

[nublete]

Are you sure you're pushing the "reset" and not the "ez setup" button ? If yes, try holding it pushed for at least 10 seconds before plugging the AC back.

[sMiLe]

Yes, I'm sure it's not EzSetup. I did use the Restore button before and it worked, but now, it's not doin anything

Hello again,

I finally found out which flash memory is used in the wl-500gP. It's an spansion S29GL064M90. The specs are here: http://www.spansion.com/datasheets/s29gl-m_00_b5_e.pdf

Unfortunately, I honestly have no clue about flash memory and hence do not know if and how the pin 10 trick can be applied to the wl-500gP. Maybe Oleg can provide any help? I read a similar procedure was done with the wl-500b before...

Kind regards,
sMiLe

[adolfotregosa]

yes you can apply the pin 10 trick. i did it myself !

[sMiLe]

Hi,

can you give me some details? I tried it but nothing happened Did you ground pin 10?

Nevertheless, I think I already trashed my Flash by messing around with the pins...

OK, talking to myself here, but Oleg proposed a fix in the firmware discussion. For anybody having the same problem and reading this thread: Pin 9 has to be grounded while powering up, afterwards, the restoreation mode will work again...

[thenextdon13]

Hello all,

I know this may be slightly off topic, because I was using dd-wrt rather than Oleg's firmware but:

Last night I got v23 SP2 ASUS VPN version running on my wl-500. I initially set the clockfreq to 300 (by doing nvram set clkfreq=300, then nvram commit, the reboot).

Box came back up fine, reported 300mhz (cpuinfo).

I then proceeded to enable jffs, usb support, knockd, etc.

For jffs, the original command line commands didn't seem to work, so i grep'd nvram show for all jffs variables, and set the following to 1 (it worked then for a while after this... and through other reboots.. so I modified the wiki's for the subject)

nvram set jffs_mounted=1
nvram set enable_jffs2=1
nvram set sys_enable_jffs2=1
nvram set clean_jffs2=1
nvram set sys_clean_jffs2=1
nvram commit

reboot

So, a couple of hours later after getting things figured out a bit with knockd, etc, I noticed that the wireless 'signal quality' was quite poor for the laptop right next to the router (30-55 %, cycling, sometimes dropping).

I decided this was possibly because of the oveclocking or the increase in txpower to 70, so:
1. i decreased the txpower to 30, still no change, so
2. Changed clkfreq to 266.

On reboot, the router never came back- the power LED would stay on. That is not the problem at this point, story continues---

So, the router would still go into recovery mode (by pressing the reset button during reboot), so I knew it was saveable. It would not reply to ping requests.

Then I shorted the solder connection by pin 9 (as listed in the sticky at the top of the forums) for 15 seconds. The power LED went out, and i could again ping the unit YAY! Smile ... WELLLL... Went about my way resetting things. This time I set the JFFS in the web GUI (as well as 'clean jffs'), and the router never came back from reboot.

So, now the power led on the router never lights up, not even if trying to go into 'recovery mode'.

The router does appear to work as a switch still. And with the case off, you can see that the wlan led lights dimly at boot (and stays lit), as do all of the eth connections if a single device is conected (the one led for the connected port is full brightness)

I see on http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Oxo that someone is working on console connectivity to the unit, but the specifics are not listed. It looks like it requires building an external rs232 circuit.


Comments/suggestions anyone?

[Oleg]

Have you tried pin9 trick again?

[thenextdon13]

Have you tried pin9 trick again?

Oleg--

Thanks for your reply. Yes, i've tried the pin9 trick again, to no avail.

I found schematics for a rs232/uart converter, but am not 100% sure this is what I need.

Have you worked with the uart/serial interface much?

take care
Camden

[Oleg]

yes, i've 2 serial cables made of nokia phone cables...

[soshea]

Hello all,

I managed to brick two brand new wl500gp routers, just call me dum and dumer . If anyone wants them just drop me a email and i will give you the address so you can arrange pickup (Brisbane).

I strongly recommend anyone considering using the wl500gp with alternative firmware, DD-WRT, OLEG, or OpenWRT to stick with the linksys hardware. These WL500's are technically better but the units are bugger, in that hardware reset and update process do not work very well at all.

I have tried all the methods suggested, reset, Firmware restoration, etc, with the expection of adding a serial port, which is just not worth my time!

[soshea]

I do not think i will use the wl500 again, they just are not up to the job. As for giving them away i am not sure how much your time is worth but mine is worth a lot more than the cost of these things.

Lets just say in regard to wl500 I Have the tshiet, i live and learn and now move on!

[Kandy]

Hi

Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction?

I've tried to upgrade my firmware to Oleg's using the built-interface but my computer crashed whilst this was happening and since then I have not been able to access my router. The power led flash slowly and all the lan and wan ports seem to light fine. Pings and the Asus recovery disk tells me the router can not be found and the pin 9 trick does not put the router back into recovery mode ( btw I didnt realise that I had to put the router into recovery mode before I update firmware ).

Am thinking about soldering a serial pinout connection but not sure if this is worth it.. how could this help anyway?

Any ideas?

Wie.

[stormwolf]

ok i managed to do this by messing around DD-WRT firmware that was installed on the unit. i was tampering with routing tables and routing modes when the unit froze....i powered it off and back on, and that was it. AT FIRST, it would take forever to assign IP to my computer, but it would do it, no acces to web interface tho. now its completely dead, just LAN led goes on when you plug the cable in, thats about it. no telnet reply, no default IP ping reply, no last IP ping reply. in short - nothing.
i cant force it into recovery mode, the power led doesnt start blinking, its just on. no wireless signal. tried shorting the pins on the flash memory - no success.
I noticed theres a 20 pin jumper type connector on board so i was thinking if i can use that to hook a JTAG cable or something to it.
out of those 20 pins, 2 are not connected to anything. (the 2 closest to the front end of the unit)
can someone tell me what pin is what for the JTAG?? and the schematic for the cable please?
i tried lookin on the net, but i cant find that matches my actual case.
The unit processor is BCM4702KPB, the flash memory is 29LV320ATTC-90
Thanks a lot