I woke up this morning with no wifi and no internet to my wired devices. At first I thought my girlfriend didn't pay the internet bill again. I logged into the router to check some things out. Low and behold, I am greeted by the Initial setup page. All of my settings and preferences were gone and I am forced to start over from scratch! I also noticed that the firmware was updated. I have never in my life seen this before. What gives?

Dont use a saved config, this has been a known problem (not the reset) but using the saved config file can bring some incompatabilities over from the saved data from the previous firmware. Hard reset and set up manually as new don't use the saved config file. Then see how things go. This article explains why ist good to reset after updates and why its not a good idea to use backup files, RMerlin develops firmware alongside Asus and really knows what he is talking about. https://www.snbforums.com/threads/faq-nvram-and-factory-default-reset.22822/

Yeah I don't think you're wrong about that and that is my general policy. I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't spent hours setting up static IPs for everything in my house just the week before. Now that I was able to restore and can copy that stuff into a spreadsheet I can very much more easily set it up again without doing all the hunting around for MAC addresses. I've never really had to restore from a router backup at home but you're right. Thanks for the post. I would still love to know how this happened to some of us and what Netgear/Duma is doing to figure out why and make sure it doesn't happen. Thanks again.

Fraser! You're in my Duma forum thread about this same issue :) I'm happy to provide whatever I can to make sure this doens't happen in the future.

Since my initial post and resetting my router this last time I have not experienced this issue and not other problems to report. Thank

Ditto. However, I will wait to see what the next automatic firmware update does before I let it go.

XR500 Factory Reset Itself!!! | NETGEAR Communities

16 Replies

Netduma-Fraser
NetDuma Partner
Mar 23, 2018
Hi Xolhid, the router would have auto upgraded you to the latest version. I imagine that is what caused the factory reset though that shouldn't have happened. Can you continue to monitor the router to see if it factory resets again or if it was just that one off? I'll also look into factory reset after updating automatically.
- Xolhid
  Apprentice
  Mar 23, 2018
  It won't be hard to keep an eye on it as the internet is unavailable until the setup is complete. It will be obvious if it happens again. I didn't think I needed to use the backup settings feature, but now I guess I have to.
  - Threlnos
    Tutor
    Mar 26, 2018
    Yeah I'm having the same issue as well it's really annoying and I don't understand what the issue is. This was working just fine for the past week and a half since I got it. I also tried to test something out an a simple reboot and that would trigger this problem as well.
ErnestTheGreat
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Apr 02, 2018
I have 2 XR500s both on latest FW 2.2.1.10 and I am not able to reproduce or observe this issue. What firmware version(s) are you guys seeing this on?
- theargonaut33
  Guide
  Apr 03, 2018
  Honestly don't remember. I'm in the current now. I was on whatever was before the current firmware.

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XR500 Factory Reset Itself!!!