N450 WiFi Suddenly Unable to Connect

[AeroBuff]

Hello everyone,

I have the N450 mode/router and have had zero issues with the wired or wireless capabilities since purchas in 2014.  However, I had a party this past Saturday where a few people signed onto my network with me entering the password.  Since then neither myself or my girlfriend have been able to connect to the WiFi with our iPhones.  My work laptop won't connect either.  My wired connection, on the other hand, is working fine.  I've done hard resets and played around in the control panel but nothing seems to work.  All devices can see the network.  My phone even continues attempting to connect, to no avail.

Any ideas on what happened?  Technical support said I have unwanted background files in there from letting people connect and they wanted to clear those on their end, but I was out of warranty.  Is this something I can do on my own?

Thanks!

[AeroBuff · Accepted solution]

OK it all makes sense now.  When I connected with my work laptop I received an "incorrect PSK for network SSID" error.  When I started troubleshooting, I saw that my "pass phrase" wasn't what it usually is, so I changed it to what I thought would just be the name of my network.  I know, silly me.  Somehow it was changed back to the router name.  Anyway, I just reverted back to my original pass phrase and I'm not connected.  

[michaelkenward]

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@AeroBuff wrote:

Hello everyone,

I have the N450 mode/router ...

That's not a modem/router. It is a wifi standard.

If you can find the model number, then you can look at the support pages for that device.

Support | NETGEAR

[AeroBuff]

Thanks for the link.  I downloaded Netgear Genie and it shows my WiFi is not running.  My control panel via internet browser shows it running and the light on the "wifi standard" is on for wifi.  That's all Genie was able to do for me at this time.  

Any thoughts on why this happened so suddenly?  I'm running the correct firmware version.  

[michaelkenward]

Hard to know. You still, have not told us what model of Netgear device you have.

N450 is a wifi standard, not a model of router or modem. Netgear makes several N450 devices.

[AeroBuff]

Woops, my apologies.

Model number: CG3000DV2

[michaelkenward]

This is one of those freaky devices that is really in the hands of your ISP.

What do you see when your devices try to connect to the wifi? Any useful messages?

One thing that you could try is to reset it to the factory default settings. See page 54 of the manual. This will restore the old default SSID and passwords, just in case one of your guests messed around with the settings.

You could also tell your wifi devices to forget the SSID and passwords for the CG3000DV2 and then set up the connections again.

[AeroBuff]

Thank you for the responses.  I will troubleshoot this with your advice tomorrow.  Spectrum did take over my service, and the issues started around that time (the day of and before the party my music through my iPhone via bluetooth to my soundbar would quit halfway through one song). 

What I see when my devices try to connect to the wifi is the router name showing up as connected then dropping back down.  Sometimes it asks for my password again.  On my work laptop (HP) it says PSK incorrect when trying to connect to the wifi.

Thanks

[AeroBuff · Accepted solution]

OK it all makes sense now.  When I connected with my work laptop I received an "incorrect PSK for network SSID" error.  When I started troubleshooting, I saw that my "pass phrase" wasn't what it usually is, so I changed it to what I thought would just be the name of my network.  I know, silly me.  Somehow it was changed back to the router name.  Anyway, I just reverted back to my original pass phrase and I'm not connected.  

[michaelkenward]

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@AeroBuff wrote:

Somehow it was changed back to the router name. 

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That was probably down to the hard reset. That puts the SSID and password back to the factory settings.

If you have problems in future, just restart the thing. If that doesn't work, then go down the reset route.