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thexterarcury's avatar
Jan 04, 2021
Solved

Bricked AC1200 - issue rebooting firmware via tftp on mac os

Like others, I got a notification on my phone that there's a new firmware for my router. I hit install, and it said it installed successfully, but then immediately after my wifi network disappeared a...
  • thexterarcury's avatar
    thexterarcury
    Jan 05, 2021

    Got it to work via nmrpflash!

     

    Steps for those on Mac OS, since it is completely not explained anywhere for noobs, here's what I did after lots of trial and error

     

    1. Download the latest firmware from the Netgear website and extract it to your desktop.

    2. Follow instructions here to set a static IP. FWIW, I left my Router entry blank as antinode suggested.

    3. Use an ethernet cord to connect to the router (one of the LAN ports, not the internet port). 

    4. Download macOS file here: https://github.com/jclehner/nmrpflash/releases

    5. Extract the zip file to your desktop as well

    5. Open terminal, type 

    cd desktop

    6. Then, I followed the instructions in the github page. These are the commands I used specifically:

     

    ./nmrpflash -L

    to pull up the list of connections and find the name of my ethernet port connected to the router (Find the one with IP 192.168.1.10)

    7. Then you turn OFF the router.

    8. For the rest of this example, let's assume that your router is connected to eth2, and that you want to flash a firmware image named R6230_V1.1.0.104_1.0.1.img.

    ./nmrpflash -i eth2 -f R6230_V1.1.0.104_1.0.1.img

    At this point I got an error saying I need to "run as root" so I simply added "sudo" to the beginning of the command. 

    sudo ./nmrpflash -i eth2 -f R6230_V1.1.0.104_1.0.1.img

    Then I got the response 

    Waiting for physical connection

    9. And then I turned on my router. I did have the reset button pushed in while turning it on. Once I turned it on, I noticed only the internet light was on. All others were off. I'd never had that happen in the past day when I was trying to fix this thing, so I knew something was going well. 

     

    After that, it should do its thing. You will see some messages in terminal but sometimes there will be a minute or two with no updates, just wait. It took about 5 minutes, I just had to wait. Once nmrpflash tells you to reboot your device, do so and it should work now. 

    10. Funny enough once I got the router back on and reconfigured it, it offered to install new firmware. I went ahead and did it via my app (which is what bricked it in the first place), figuring they had patched the bug. Looks like I was right. The new version is 106 and it restarted fine this time, but if it fails again then you can always use nmrpflash to reboot it. 

     

    Hope this helps those who are mac users. For windows users I imagine it might be a bit easier to run nmrpflash but I don't know.