Strange issue with WL500gP and DD-WRT

[KevinBoyle]

Hi,

I have spent the last week or two trying every possible solution (except opening my router) and I can't seem to get anything to work, so I am going to post my problem here so that I can get some feedback from you guys.

I have a WL500gP onto which I installed DD-WRT Standard using the firmware restoration utility.

This worked fine until I decided to go back to the standard Asus firmware. No dice. I can't get it to work. I ahve tried the original asus firmware, olegs and various other firmwares. The only firmware I can get to work is the DD-WRT and the OpenWRT firmwares, no other ones work.

The firmware restoration utility uploads the new firmware, starts "Automatic System Recovery" and gets to 99%, then it fails and says unable to contact wireless device.

When I restart the device, the power LED is flashing.

I restart in recovery mode and can flash back dd-wrt or openwrt, but nothing else.

I have also tried wl500g-recover.trx and wl500g.clear_nvram.trx all to no joy.

If anybody can suggest a next step to me I would be very grateful.

Thanks,
Kevin

[superkev]

Make sure that after you flash the wl500g.clear_nvram.trx, you reset the router and wait about 1-2 minutes. Then flash the wl500g-recover.trx and wait 1-2 minutes. I guess they are programs that take a bit of time to do their jobs before you flash over them. This was not always made clear in the tutorials that I read.

After you've flashed those two and waited for each to finish working, then flash the firmware of your choice.

Good luck!

[KevinBoyle]

Thanks for your help SuperKey. I am not at the router at the minute, I will give that a try on Monday and get back to you.

[nant15]

For me, Firmware restoration utility only seems to work with ASUS based firmware only - as i have tried. Try using Device Discovery utility - it also won't show your router running.

What you have to do is to have original_asus_firmware.trx file ready somewhere (eg: c:\ ) then unplug your router, press reset button then plug in to put your router in recovery mode ( with PWR LED Blinking ).

Plug your PC to router on Port 1 (other ports don't work), set your PC's IP to be in the same net as router ( eg: 192.168.1.123 subnet 255.255.255.0 ) and then you will be able to ping the router ( ping 192.168.1.1) using console window.

After that, use tftp utility (just open command line and type tftp, it's come with windows - if you're using vista, google for it and you will find free 3rd party ones ) to upload new (original) firmware to router i believe it is something like:


tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT c:\firmware.trx

after 10-20 seconds, you will see a message that file was transmitted successfully. Now, look at your router - the PWR LED will stop blinking, wait until the LED goes off (flashing finishes). Then you can unplug the router and plug in again.

To Reset NVRAM, just Press and Hold the Reset button for 20-30 seconds after you plug in the power. I'm not sure about this one though.

That's it. Actually, this is what i believe to be the correct way to flash new firmware to the router....

Hope that's helps.