Dead or brick ? Lan and WAN 1-4 leds on steady

[shortboy]

Hi guys,

first of all - thanks for this thread. It helped me to solve the problem almost immediately. I've just experienced the problem with power adapter. Exactly same behavior - 1-4 LAN + WAN leds on and nothing helped. I found out, that power adapter from my old D-Link DIR-100 is 5V/1.2A, so I plugged it in and it worked - lucky me

Looks like the WL-500gP's power supply is really crappy...

[radko]

Please explain how to recover dead unit?
Only led LAN and WAN are on if i connect cable.
Power LED and AIR led are off.
I can't ping router also restore button doesn't work.
I try pin 9 trick but it doesn't work.
Please give me some advice and one question where is pin 16 in this router.
I checked power supplay it's OK.

best regards

[LanLord]

I had the same problem last week (LAN + WAN leds lit with no activity; POWER + AIR off). You should try with another power supply, because I'm 90% sure that's the problem even if it 'looks' OK.

I used a power unit from an USB Hub (5V 2.1 Amps).

Good luck!

[radko]

Unit with faulty power supply have all led light. Also I change the power supply for another but nothing change. Please give some clue.

[Wayland]

Hello,

for some days now my WL-500g Premium (v1) acts very strange. I think it started with the following symptom (symptom 1):
- power LED goes out for about 0.2 seconds
- after ~0.5 seconds all 4 LAN ports + WAN port light up for another 0.5 seconds
- during this time my computer says it has lost its LAN connection (as if the router restarted..)
- router works for some seconds (all LEDs glowing as they should)
- starts over

Sometimes this went on for some hours, sometimes it stopped after some minutes. After that the router worked for some hours.


Then another symptom appeared (symptom 2):

As soon as I turned on the router (also after unplugging it for several minutes) the 4 LAN ports and the WAN port were permanentely on and all other LEDs (power and WLAN) were off. But only one LAN port and the WAN port were connected. My computer wasn't detecting a LAN connection (layer 1 problem?). So ping etc. didn't work. It was also impossible to enter recovery mode. After leaving the router on over night when I checked again it was working as usual..


Another funny behavior:

The router was working normally when I connected another computer to a LAN port. It started to do its constant rebooting (symptom 1) but stopped after a while. But my PPPoE conenction was disconnected. So I manually triggered the connect and as soon as I did the router started rebooting again. I tried it several times. When I disconnected the other computer I was able to connect to my ISP as usual.


Short history of my router:

I bought it a bit over 2 years ago (so it's out of warranty since the end of January.. :P) and almost immediately flashed it with DD-WRT. I had some troubles at some point and bricked it but was able to recover it by shortening pin 9. It was running quite stable for the last half year I think. I haven't touched it for at least a month. The faulty behavior started out of the blue.


What I've already tried:

1.
Flashing it with the clear-nvram and recover images. The flashing worked and after the recover image it seemed to run stable (didn't do a long-term test). But flashing it with DD-WRT again or the original Asus firmware restored the faulty behavior.

2.
After I read that shortening pin 9 isn't so great I did the suggested software clean up: erase /dev/mtd/3; erase /dev/mtd/4; reboot;. It couldn't find /dev/mtd/4 but deleted /dev/mtd/3 successfully. But it also didn't help.

3.
After I was stuck again with symptom 2 today I finally tried to short pin 9 again. With the case opened I noticed that the WLAN LED was also glowing but only very weakly. The router didn't even react to the pin shortening. The 5 LEDS (WAN+LAN) simply kept glowing.


So is this behavior in any way known? I've read something today in this forum about a possible problem with the power supply. Could it be the case here? It somehow correlates with the funny behavior I described above. As if the router wasn't receiving enough power for talking to another computer.


Any hint would be greatly appreciated!

[avberk]

The power supply should always be the first thing to check with funny led behaviour.

Thus, try another one with the same specs.

[wengi]

Hi,

this is by 90% power supply.
Have a look at http://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=21515
This is a german thread but it will give you an idea of the faulty capacitor.

Otherwise get a psu 5V 2,5A.

wengi

[Wayland]

Wow cool! Thanks for the fast responses! I'll try this sometimes this week and then post back the results.

[Wayland]

Hey,

so this really worked, all the funky LED behavior stopped. I've been able to flash the router. But now I seem to have really really bricked it.

[cdman]

Thank you so much! I had the same problem and getting a new source fixed it. So I donated a little money. Thanks again!

[Dr Qubit]

I had the same problem: the thing appeared bricked, not responding even to the reset button. The symptoms for me were that, when I turned it on, the four LAN LEDs and WAN LED were lit (but not the power LED).

I popped open the power adapter (I like the technique described here: http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-op...former-270527/), and the exploded 1200uF capacitor was staring me in the face.

If you're not quite sure whether the capacitor is bust or not, you should see a smaller capacitor of a similar type towards the middle of one side of the board. Compare the top of the 1200uF capacitor with the top of that smaller one. The tops should look similarly flat. If the top of the 1200uF capacitor looks slightly domed, it's almost certainly the culprit.

The original capacitor was a 1200uF electrolytic capacitor rated for 5V and 105 degrees C. I replaced it with a 1000uF rated for 16V and 105 degrees C. (Since this is a power supply, it seems sensible to match the temperature rating.) I made something of a pig's ear of the soldering (it's been a while...), but after putting the thing back together, everything worked perfectly!

One thing you need to be careful of when replacing the capacitor is to get the polarity right, otherwise the replacement is likely to explode as soon as you plug in the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors typically have a coloured bar down the side with minus signs along it, indicating the negative lead. If you're sensible (unlike me!), take note of which way around the original component is before you take it out, and put the replacement in the same way around. In case you forget, with the original capacitor removed you should be able to see a + near one side of the circle printed underneath the capacitor, and the negative side is indicated by the two lines across the circle (at least on my board).

So, instead of having to buy a new router, or even a new power supply, all it took was a £0.27 capacitor (less the 50 cents), and a bit of solder.

Thanks so much to this forum, and especially Basser's brilliant post and photos!

[Jasman]

I have a WL-500gx, and I'm pretty sure my adapter's bad (unit suddenly keeps "resetting" - all four LAN lights flash about every 5-10 secs). My adapter is a DVE DSA-0101F-05 A, 5V 2A. I cracked it open and see what I think are two capacitors near the cord (one right where the cord is soldered to the board - 10V 680uF), and one above that, which I can't read) and one much larger one at the opposite corner - 400V 22uF. None look domed. I'm not an electronics guy, so don't even know what or how to test, but I can use a soldering iron. Is there one capacitor I should suspect, or maybe just replace all three? Thanks.

I had the same problem: the thing appeared bricked, not responding even to the reset button. The symptoms for me were that, when I turned it on, the four LAN LEDs and WAN LED were lit (but not the power LED).

I popped open the power adapter (I like the technique described here: http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-op...former-270527/), and the exploded 1200uF capacitor was staring me in the face.

If you're not quite sure whether the capacitor is bust or not, you should see a smaller capacitor of a similar type towards the middle of one side of the board. Compare the top of the 1200uF capacitor with the top of that smaller one. The tops should look similarly flat. If the top of the 1200uF capacitor looks slightly domed, it's almost certainly the culprit.

The original capacitor was a 1200uF electrolytic capacitor rated for 5V and 105 degrees C. I replaced it with a 1000uF rated for 16V and 105 degrees C. (Since this is a power supply, it seems sensible to match the temperature rating.) I made something of a pig's ear of the soldering (it's been a while...), but after putting the thing back together, everything worked perfectly!

One thing you need to be careful of when replacing the capacitor is to get the polarity right, otherwise the replacement is likely to explode as soon as you plug in the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors typically have a coloured bar down the side with minus signs along it, indicating the negative lead. If you're sensible (unlike me!), take note of which way around the original component is before you take it out, and put the replacement in the same way around. In case you forget, with the original capacitor removed you should be able to see a + near one side of the circle printed underneath the capacitor, and the negative side is indicated by the two lines across the circle (at least on my board).

So, instead of having to buy a new router, or even a new power supply, all it took was a £0.27 capacitor (less the 50 cents), and a bit of solder.

Thanks so much to this forum, and especially Basser's brilliant post and photos!

[avberk]

Also open your asus router and look for domed capacitors
if possible try another powersupply before you start soldering

[heavyrail]

I've got WL-500GPv2 router and by mistake I tried to apply 32MB-RAM patch for v1:

nvram set sdram_init=0x0009
nvram set sdram_ncdl=0
nvram commit
reboot

After that LAN1-LAN4 and WAN LEDs became lit constantly, and router could not be put in recovery mode using standard RESET button technique. I had googled similar cases, and found out that serial console would help. I've tried two variants of serial console adapter - MAX232-based and FT232-based, but there was nothing on the terminal. So I tried to ground pin 9 on flash chip during boot. Since I did the trick, the behaviour of router had changed. Now LAN LEDs is off, WAN LED reflects actual activity, and I can put it in recovery mode with Power LED flashing continuously... but I can't reflash it! No pings to 192.168.1.1, still no activity on serial console, both Linux atftp tool and Windows ASUS firmware restoration utility don't work.
Please tell me what's probably happened with my router? Maybe my serial console doesn't work properly because of wrong soldering etc? Can anyone point me to exact schematic that work? Maybe the last chance to reflash is JTAG? But I couldn't find nor any schematic neither howto on this. Can anyone help me?

[pedrinho]

hi,
try this, has revived my box - wl500g premium v2

- prepare on pc firmware file original or ....... any other *.trx
- prepare on pc firmware restore software (from cd)

- power off
- connect pin 16 from flash chip to ground, power on until power led is flashing,
- remove ground wire
- start restore (upload) software with chosen firmware
- after upload box (mine was) should be alive with 192.168.1.1
- connect telnet and run "erase nvram", "erase linux"
- upload firmware again
- power off
- reboot

rgds, pedrinho