Bricked WNDAP360

[trebours]

Hi all,

I wanted to share my experience with debricking a WNDAP360.
I work in an open-space where 5 WNDAP360 are bricked, and have been for the past few years. I don't know how it happened, but I guess it's similar to https://community.netgear.com/t5/Business-Wireless/WC7520-bricking-quot-WNDAP360-How-to-recover-the-...

The AP emits no wifi, has no traffic on the Ethernet port (I used wireshark to monitor), the factory reset button does nothing.

I bought a RS232 cable and used it to try to flash the firmware manually as explained here: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Business-Wireless/WNDAP360-Power-light-is-blinging/td-p/1694131

I am able to perform all commands explained in the post, but after the last one, it still doesn't work with a cahin of mysterious errors that go like "jffs2_scan_eraseblock(): Magic bitmask 0x1985 not found at 0x00000000: 0x7173 instead" and end up in a kernel panic, then the AP rebooting and doing this over and over again.

I didn't understand why it was giving me an error about JFFS2 as  the rootfs in the firmware does not use JFFS2 but SquashFS. I then looked at the environment variables in u-boot using `printenv` and indeed the value of bootargs specifies that rootfs is of type jffs2 (`bootargs=console=ttyS0,9600 root=31:03 rootfstype=jffs2 init=/sbin/init mtdparts=ar7100-nor0:256k(uboot),64k(env),1024k(kernel),6208k(rootfs),512k(var),64k(manu-data),64k(art-data)`)  which cannot be the case. I reset the `bootargs` to its original value by digging into OpenWRT documentation (https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndap360#u-boot_info_commands😞

- `setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,9600 rootfstype=squashfs root=31:03 init=/sbin/init mtdparts=ar7100-nor0:256k(u-boot),64k(u-boot-env),1024k(vmlinux.gz.uImage),6208k(rootfs),512k(var),64k(manufacturing-data),64k(ART)`
- `saveenv`

and then I retried the `bootm 0xbf050000` and it finally worked.