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Forum Discussion
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....
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?
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
Hi pbarham / Paul. Thanks for the response and link. I will see how I get on connecting the serial cable and resetting my config variables. Sad to hear that the router failed again but I can't say that I am surprised. What Ubiquiti system did you get out of interest and how have you got it set up?
Chris
cdbarker We moved house recently and the new home had a bunch of Unifi WiFI 6 access points that were left by the previous owner:
https://www.ui.com/wi-fi/. When I installed the app to reconfigure these, I really loved the software and all of the disgnostics. (see https://www.ui.com/consoles for an idea of how flexible this all is!)
As a result, I decided to buy one of their 'Dream Machine' router/accesspoint/managemet consoles https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-unifi-os-consoles/products/unifi-dream-machine. I can also add PoE access points incrementally to increase coverage in a large house, and have control over wired/wirelss backhaul etc.
It's a nice, solid piece of kit, and it seems you get what you pay for in this space. (though, to be honest, it's not much different to the Orbi prices really if you shop around)