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Forum Discussion
Force RBR50 to TFTP for un-brick?
I purchased a cheap broken RBR50 on ebay to get some replacement plastic parts. Got the parts I wanted and now I want to play a bit. Orbi has pulsing white LEDs and solid green power LED. No oth...
There has to be a way to load this thing with a bootloader. Most router have a JTAG or serial interface to get an initial image before any flash is formatted. I have done this with other hardware so I have the tools. The Orbi board doesn't have an markings that give a clue where that interface might be. There is one header marked TP1/JP901that looks interesting. NETGEAR - sure could use a clue here!! Please!!
Scott
PS I agree that those test points and jumpers look likely suspects, especially since there are also a bunch of silk sreen labesl for SPI NAND and MMC right next door which are all flash related.
But I would hesitate to randomly play around without some pointers from a Netgear HW dev. Since there are SO many bricked Orbi routers around (just look at eBay!) I'm amazed that this info isn't available. (It's almost like there is some financial incentive not to make these things fixable by end users)
Oh.... just came across this post which looks very interesting: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Orbi-RBR50-seems-stuck-in-boot-loop/m-p/1948614/highlight/true#M98222
Somethign to investigate tomorrow.
If you can get into U-Boot, there are lots of options and you can almost certainly de-brick the router using the internal serial port. I have attached info on that. In my case, the U-Boot in flash got corrupted. I want to reprogram flash in some way to clean up the corrupt U-Boot.
Scott