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Forum Discussion
Router wifi settings gone after power outage
After a power outage, my Nighthawk router's wifi settings were gone and only I found default Netgear SSID's. I was able to log into the router with my admin password and other network settings seem t...
Yes I can do the restore. It's still annoying since you have to go through setting up your security questions, password and agreements before getting to the restore portion.
Also if the power drops while I'm away for work, my wife and/or kids will have no clue how to get things going again. It's a joke that they told you not to unplug it.
Also if the power drops while I'm away for work, my wife and/or kids will have no clue how to get things going again. It's a joke that they told you not to unplug it.
I thought you might appreciate an update on the situation.
So the first time I called tech support I was sold a subsription to GearHead support to get further help. Reluctantly, I bought it. Mind you, my router is still within the one year warranty, but out of the 90-day phone support period. Cool.
After the upsell, tech tried - unsuccessfully - to diagnose and fix the problem. After some basic troubleshooting, she had me re-flash the firmware on the router. It didn't work. She then said there was nothing wrong with my router and that I should call GearHead support if I want further help. Yay, time wasted.
A few days later I called GearHead. Tech was knowledgable and helpful: she understood the issue, had me replicate it to verification, and promptly set up an RMA order. New unit works just like it's supposed to. If you unplug it, it retains your settings in its flash memory. Feels good.
And that's it. I could have spent less money doing this had the first tech fully informed me of the GearHead support price tiers (she left out the pay-per-incident option), which I thought was dishonest. It's over now.:
hell0world wrote:
A few days later I called GearHead. Tech was knowledgable and helpful: she understood the issue, had me replicate it to verification, and promptly set up an RMA order. New unit works just like it's supposed to. If you unplug it, it retains your settings in its flash memory. Feels good.
Are you saying that this is a hardware issue and new firmware will not fix the problem?
That really sucks! My r7800 started having the same problem a few weeks ago - whenever I reboot, either by powercycle or software reboot, it looses its configuration settings.- I can't say if it's a hardware issue with any certainty. If I were to speculate: I think this is an issue Netgear has recognized and is working on a fix via a firmware patch. Meanwhile RMA appears to be the only way to remedy the issue for the user.
Anecdotally, this looks to be affecting a significant chunk of the Nighthawk routers. I wonder how widespread the issue is. According to some investigation on the SNBForums, at least for the R7800, units that use a Macronix chip tend to lose their settings upon reboot/power out. Those that use a Micron or Spansion/SkyHigh Memory (venture between Cypress & SK Hynix) do not suffer this issue. But this is only related to NVRAM settings. Not all settings are stored in it. Some are just plain files
microchip8 wrote:According to some investigation on the SNBForums, at least for the R7800, units that use a Macronix chip tend to lose their settings upon reboot/power out. Those that use a Micron or Spansion/SkyHigh Memory (venture between Cypress & SK Hynix) do not suffer this issue. But this is only related to NVRAM settings. Not all settings are stored in it. Some are just plain files
Knowing this seems to scratch the one Netgear router I would recommend off of my list leaving ZERO Netgear routers I would recommend. Should not have to play russian roulette when buying a r7800. Hum wonder what chip this one has.
Well, Macronix could have had a bad batch of chips that ended up in some R7800s or other models. There are thousands (dare I say millions?) of NG routers sold and only a handful of people complain about this issue. My own R7800 uses a SkyHigh chip so I'm not affected by this problem
I personally think the issue is more widespread than just a handful. There are people who will just take the default settings and go with it, in which case, they will never know that settings were lost due to a power cycle. There are also people who encountered the problem and ended up in one of these forums, lost faith, and returned the product without doing a post. I'm sure there are also people who just "live with it", or found an automated solution to automatically restore settings when power failure is detected (perhaps Selenium or other web automation tools can be used to automate this). I just know that if I google "netgear lost settings", I find several threads with various models being mentioned.
microchip8 wrote:There are thousands (dare I say millions?) of NG routers sold and only a handful of people complain about this issue. My own R7800 uses a SkyHigh chip so I'm not affected by this problem
What you say maybe true. I suspect it is like suggested, some folks just give up and roll with the defaults. Others never power cycle after config so they are fine especially if on UPS. I suspect there are a number, large (?) who knows, that just chuck in bin and move on to another vendor. I personally would not put up with it and since Netgear will not cross ship an RMA I would just chuck in bin, or better yet take to my electronics recycle place. One thing I will not tolerate in my house is tech that has issues that cannot be resolved. I have fun trying to figure out issues, its when it is something that is not fixable that I chuck it. If I were chucking in bin, I would not buy another from that vendor.
I would think that a reputable company would notify folks who purchased the router that theirs is in a defective range. Am sure they can tell by serial number what the probability is. From what I can tell from other things Netgear has done recently, things like dropping features that people bought their router for to put in their money grab Armor, that they really do not care about the customer. Wonder how many chucked the router when the feature they relied on was removed. That would do it for me. Look at the mess the firmware is in and has been for over a year, maybe two now?
I RMA'ed my R7800 because of the lost configuration settings issue on reboot/powercycle.
I setup the new R7800 and it seems to work fine. The settings remain after reboot and powercycle.
I just hope my new model doesn't have the bad NVRAM chipset that broke after 10 months.
(I can't be 100% sure that it is the NVRAM problem but the SNBForums thread pointed out by microchip8 and the R7800 entry on OpenWRT strongly suggests it.)The OpenWRT device page for the R7800 https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/r7800 says
There are some models, which have broken NANDs. when flashing the Kernel, some (mostly one) blocks are skipped. As a result, the start of the root-partition (called "ubi" in this model) comes later.
OpenWRT knows about this problem and they have a workaround. You would think that Netgear would do the same.
The RMA process was not easy.
The support wanted me to pay for 6 months of support for $79.99 to diagnose the problem since my 60 days of free support expired. I still had two months on the 1 year warranty.
I refused to pay since if I would rather use that money to buy a new router.
After haggling, I agreed to pay $50 if they fixed my lost configuration settings issue. If they didn't, I would pay nothing and get the RMA.I went through about 1 hour of resetting the R7800 with a paperclip, reloading flashing the firmware, re-entering the my configuration, etc. Nothing solved the lost configuration on reboot problem.
Finally, they agreed it was a hardware problem and I got my RMA.In a more perfect world, Netgear support would have simply asked for my serial number, seen I had the bad NVRAM chipset, and gave me a RMA.
Well, once again, my router went dark, and I had to power cycle it again, only to have it come up wide open again. This is totally unacceptable. I haggled with a support engineer (more of a salesman) wanting me to buy support option with lots of promises, I asked for it in writing, and eventually got disconnected.
I will never buy another Netgear product if I can help it. Totally unacceptable for a device to have such a bad securty fault - and you would think they'd want to avoid the branding damage and get them replaced.
- I agree that this whole situation is disappointing and I will definitely not be wasting my money with Netgear unless something is done.
Totally agree that we all need to stay away from Netgear products. I not only had router issues, but also NAS and camera issues. Useless products! They don't seem to care about their customers.
I just wanted to come back and report the progress I've made!
I invested in Ubiquiti's Unifi Dream Machine Pro and Access Point. Wow, I cannot believe what I have been missed all this time. I wish I would have had this gear back when the kids were teenagers. I'm blown away at the features and control. I will be adding some more to it.
As for the Netgear Nighthawk? I plan on making a video on how to blow it up, shoot it, burn it, run over it. Any polls on suggestions on how to make a dead router more dead? lol
- So I read this thread after my router (R8000) started resetting to factory specs including the open guest networks. I had hoped that there was a cmos type battery inside that died. I tried everything that I could find... downgrade firmware, re-upgrade, factory reset, manually type in my config. Unplug the router and xxxxxxx everything is gone everytime.
Then ended up finding an older thread where several people were having the same issues with the R9000 and the R7800. Then someone tried free 3rd party (Open sourcd) firmware from DD-WRT which fixed it... meaning this is a firmware issue. I flashed mine to DD-WRT’s R8000... typed in my settings and unplugged my router. Plugged it back in and wah-la, my SSID’s all there. I even re-flashed netgear’s firmware after that and then my original config/backup file and it retains my settings when the power goes out or if I reboot my router. superman_006 please send me a link to the flash info.
Update... my 2-year-old expensive router finally had to be replaced this weekend. Not only did I have security issues with the power outages, but every few hours I had to restart my router because my devices could not connect to the wifi. It also started assigning the same IP address to 2 devices. Seriously?!?!
I'm hoping that flashing this crappy router will allow me to use it for the additional SSID's that I need. Unfortunately my new router is only a dual-band router.
Ever since taking in Unifi, I've come to realize more and more the junk vendors that are saturating the waves with overamplified signal to try to make their products work. And it just causes the field to get worse and worse and disrupts other things in airwaves.
I've actually turned down my signal to "low" on my 2.4Ghz APs (again, talking Unifi, not this Netgear trash) and much better results! Not bleeding all over the airwaves now.
