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Old 08-17-2011, 07:51 PM
atholon is offline atholon
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Unbricking a Netgear WGR614 v9

Today I was an idiot and tried to update my firmware for my Wireless Netgear router over the wireless connection. I lost connection while it was updating (I guess?). After that all I got was a blinking power light.

I tried to reset the firmware using a recovery utility that came on my router's cd but that failed saying "Unable to detect an ethernet connection".

I ended up finding a post on: danielvexoe's blog that saved my bacon and just wanted to share it.

Source

This is a guide on how to “unbrick” your Netgear WGR614v9 after a bad firmware update, e.g. trying to update over wireless.

Before you continue below, make sure you’ve first tried a hard reset to revive your router:

Disconnect the router from all cables except the power cable.
Push reset button for 30 secs.
Without releasing reset button, disconnect power cord.
Hold the reset button for another 30 secs.
Replug the power cord.
Still hold the reset button for another 30 secs.
Release the reset button and give the router about 10 secs to resettle.
Disconnect power cord for another 10 secs and then reconnect.
All should be in default settings now.
If a hard reset doesn’t work, then try the following:

During startup, the router will pause to accept a temporary firmware upload via TFTP, so:
Connect your computer to the router using a wired connection and try pinging it.
If pinging 192.168.1.1 does not work, check the IP-address of your computer and make sure it is assigned an IP address in the subnet of the router IP. For simplicity’s sake you can assume “192.168.1.x” is good. If you do not have a good IP, the DHCP server might not be working. So set your IP manually to something like 192.168.1.77 with 192.168.1.1 as your gateway and then try pinging the router again.

Power the router on with a continuous ping running in a command window:
ping -t -w 2 192.168.1.1 (The -w 2 parameter forces a lower timeout for the ping answer, this makes it easier to get an answer from the bricked router.)

You should see at least a few replies from 192.168.1.1. Do this several times to be sure. If it replies you have a good chance of simple recovery. If you still receive no response, the IP address may be something other than 192.168.1.1. You should attempt to obtain the IP address of the router. Especially if previous firmware set the boot_wait variable to on, the router pauses even longer than normal during bootup to accept a recovery flash. All you need to do is provide a firmware to it via TFTP during this window of time.

Prepare your PC, firmware file and TFTP software and play with the timing of powering it on and starting the TFTP session just after applying power (or as soon as you start to see ping replies). If you try it a number of times (at least 10) you will probably rescue the router with no fuss!

The newest firmware can be found here.

Microsoft Windows contains a TFTP client. Windows Vista will require that you enable it in Programs and Features. With TFTP, all of the information about the transfer is specified during the initial setup; there is little client/server interaction as compared with standard FTP. To flash a router using Microsoft Windows, open a command prompt, change to the directory containing the original firmware to use for this boot, and then enter the following command:

tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT firmware.chk (this example assumes your routers IP-address is 192.168.1.1 and the firmware file name is firmware.chk)

If you have not got a TFTP client installed, it doesn’t work or something else, then try using this TFTP program called tftp2 available here (this will start the download).

Now your Netgear WGR614v9 is working like before with default settings, and all there is left to do is set it up using the normal web interface using http://192.168.1.1!

In theory this should work on any version of the Netgear WGR614, but this has only been tested on version 9, WGR614v9.
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Old 08-17-2011, 09:01 PM
Guest001 is offline Guest001
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Join Date: Aug 2008
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Complex but good news for the cash strapped (no visit by IT expert).
10/10
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