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Forum Discussion
cdbarker
Aug 22, 2021Guide
RBR50 won’t boot up
Hi. I previously posted on the community about the inability to upgrade my RBR50 firmware from v2.7.2.104 to v2.7.3.22. I now have the dreaded 'bricked' situation where my router will no longer boot....
plemans
Aug 22, 2021Guru - Experienced User
Have you tried nmrpflash? I've seen that work when tftp didn't.
cdbarker
Aug 22, 2021Guide
Hi plemans, thanks for the reply. I haven't tried the nmrpflash. I will give it a go.
- cdbarkerAug 22, 2021Guide
Hi plemans. The fnmrpflash appeared to copy over the image to the RBR50 but the router is still in a state of constant boot with the ring light pulsing white. Below are the command line
C:\Users\Chris\Downloads\nmrpflash-0.9.16-win32>nmrpflash -i net12 -f RBR50-V2.7.2.104.img
Waiting for Ethernet connection.
Advertising NMRP server on net12 ... \
Received configuration request from 78:d2:94:b9:fa:9f.
Sending configuration: 10.164.183.252/24.
Received upload request: filename 'firmware'.
Uploading RBR50-V2.7.2.104.img ... Warning: TFTP block rollover. Upload might fail!
OK (45353089 b)
Waiting for remote to respond.
Received configuration request from 78:d2:94:b9:fa:9f.
Sending configuration: 10.164.183.252/24.
Received CONF_REQ while waiting for TFTP_UL_REQ!
Received configuration request from 78:d2:94:b9:fa:9f.
Sending configuration: 10.164.183.252/24.
Received CONF_REQ while waiting for TFTP_UL_REQ!
Received configuration request from 78:d2:94:b9:fa:9f.
Sending configuration: 10.164.183.252/24.
Received CLOSE_REQ while waiting for TFTP_UL_REQ!
Remote finished. Closing connection.
Reboot your device now.Running out of things to try other than opening up the orbi and connecting to the serial header as mentiojned in another post. I'm no networking expert but may have a go, if I hjave the time.
- cdbarkerAug 28, 2021Guide
Well FURRYe38 you will be pleased to know that Blanca_O did contact me and yesterday I had a brief conversation with NG Support. I explained everything that I had tried to resolve the issue of my Orbi being in a constant boot cycle of pulsing white light on the top ring but sadly, there was nothing that they could do. The term they used was the router is 'bricked' and unusable and I needed to buy another. I had already taken this action and bought a used RBR50 off eBay which is working fine on the latest FW v2.7.3.22. This router actually resets to factory defaults, oh the joys of such basic things!
Anyway, I want to try and open up the old Orbi and connect a USB to TTL serial port cable to see if I can interrupt the boot sequence and reset some of my Orbi hardware config which must be corrupted.
Who out there can advise on actions to take please? Can you pbarham if I PM you?- pbarhamAug 28, 2021Apprentice
I eventually got fet up with the unreliability of my Orbi system (the router failed again!) and moved on to a Uniquiti system - which is just a joy to use in comparison.
Pretty much everything I could telll you about 'unbricking' a router is in this post:
There's a link in there showing how to disassemble and connect the serial cable, plus some description of the commands you can use in the boot loader to run tests and to fix up broken config settings in the flash that are probably the reason it won't boot.
For me, a power brownout had corrupted that flash so that the router didn't know which model number it was, and so it was refusing to boot any of the firmaware images (including the 'factory reset' one). The serial console luckily printed an error message telling me what hardware version ("board id") it was expecting to see... and I just wrote that back into the config variable.
However, there are probably loads of different ways that a router might get into this state, and you may have to just play it by ear. (you can print out all of the config "environment variables" and look for any that seem empty/corrupted/wrong. You can maybe compare with some other forum user. (My Orbi router is gone now - though I do have an unused satelltite sitting in the garage)
Hope this helps,
Paul