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how I just recovered my WN802T-200 from bricked status
the following information is purely a recollection of what I have had to do in the last 24 hours to get my WN802T-200 apparently working again. No warranty, liability or support expectation of any kind is offered by this post. If the following kills your box, it's your problem. please remember standard static electricity protection and that electricity kills people as well as electronics, etc. if in any doubt you should consult a qualified competent person before undertaking anything.
please, no questions, no emails !
and the moment you start down the path of self fix, you have kissed good bye to any expectation of any support from anyone, netgear especially ;-)
I was on 3.1.3 . then I got sucked into dreaming about how much better 3.1.12 might be. mistake here was I then tried to do something about it and apply 3.1.12. MISTAKE. ain't broke? don't fix !
I would like to thank those that gave fantastic clues as to how to approach the challenge, but I write up notes here with my instructions to myself, in case I need to do it again with the next firmware update.
1) I needed to talk 'Serial TTL' to the WN802T-200. I found that the firm http://www.ftdichip.com makes a selection of USB cables with the electronics all built into the usb plug. I bought one of their TTL-232R-3V3 cables via www.amazon.co.uk, that comes with a 6 pin plug. I then used a tiny safety pin (opened out) to persuade the 6 pins out of their plug frame, then reserted ground, TX and RX back in to the correct pin out for the netgear box. the netgear has 4 pins.. on mine, the white dot (pin 1) was 3.3V, then (pin 2) rx, (pin 3) tx, (pin 4 ground). so my reassembled plug ... 2 = yellow, 3 = orange, 4 = black, and the other 3 pins I seperately insulated each (pvc electrical tape) then taped them backwards out of the way. (Fluke kit is good for confirming what signalling is on which pins)
2) windows 7... this bit was easy... I plugged in the usb cable (1) and bingo... my pc went off to microsoft, found and installed properly tested signed and published drivers. thank you ftdichip. good job. once installed, via device manager I found that the usb device was now com3, and I set com3 to 115200 baud. 8n1.
3) windows 7.. hmm.. no terminal client any more... ok, thank you putty. 0.62 was current yesterday... not sure where to download from so I ended up on wikipedia, and followed links.
4) so to the wn802T-200... removing one of the tiny screws allowed the front face plate to slide down and be removed. revealing the circuit board. instructions from others' posts were to connect to the serial port and power up the pc before energising the wn802t-200. seemed to work for me.
5) in putty, connected to com3, 115200, etc... suddenly the access point is talking to me ! ok, I hit return a couple of times, and uboot gets interrupted. magic... light on the horizon...
6) commands I used: (don't use just yet, read to the end before trying anything)
- printenv displays environment settings
- help (obvious..)
- setenv ipaddr 192.168..... sets the ip address I'd like the ap to be so I can talk to my tftp server
- setenv serverip 192.168.... sets the ip address of the tftp server i want to talk to
- run flash_kernel
- run flash_rootfs
- boot
7) I prepared a tftp server. so I use solarwinds's tftp server on an old windows xp laptop. took a little while to set a policy in symantec to open up udp 69 for tftp inbound traffic, but sorted.
8) ip addresses: seems wn802t-200 defaults to 192.168.0.233
but rather than mess around changing my local subnets, I found I could change the access point to a spare ip address on my build lan. hence my tftp server was simple to use.
9) I fetched from netgear.com the 2.0.2. version of the firmware, got to the .tar image, and then use winrar to unpack the tar file into 4 files, 2 images and 2 checksum counts. put the 4 files in the root directory of the tftp server.
10) then I did the commands in (6).
11) magically, putty tells me about all the progress, and a reboot, and... yay ! life returned to my access point. and the access point was back on http://192.168.0.233
12) not home run yet. I then had trouble getting back to my prefered settings on my chosen IP address.
13) this is where things were not perfect. 3.1.12 had messed something big up. I found doing a factory reset once on 2.0.2 helps restore base settings. then build a new profile, but interesting use a different end ip address. Every time I tried to use my originally assigned ip address, the box semi bricked again. not sure the issue here, but bypassing the problem sometimes is good enough. I guess there is some ghost of a corrupted profile not flushed by the factory reset maybe??
14) so my access point now boots, and seems to work like it did when I bought it some 3 years ago.
remember... No warranty, liability or support expectation of any kind is offered in by this post. If you kill your box, it's your problem. please remember static electricity protection and that electricity kills people as well as electronics, etc. if in any doubt you should consult a qualified, competent person before undertaking anything.
caveat emptor as they used to say in Rome...
please, no questions, no emails !
and the moment you start down the path of self fix, you have kissed good bye to any expectation of any support from anyone, netgear especially ;-)
I was on 3.1.3 . then I got sucked into dreaming about how much better 3.1.12 might be. mistake here was I then tried to do something about it and apply 3.1.12. MISTAKE. ain't broke? don't fix !
I would like to thank those that gave fantastic clues as to how to approach the challenge, but I write up notes here with my instructions to myself, in case I need to do it again with the next firmware update.
1) I needed to talk 'Serial TTL' to the WN802T-200. I found that the firm http://www.ftdichip.com makes a selection of USB cables with the electronics all built into the usb plug. I bought one of their TTL-232R-3V3 cables via www.amazon.co.uk, that comes with a 6 pin plug. I then used a tiny safety pin (opened out) to persuade the 6 pins out of their plug frame, then reserted ground, TX and RX back in to the correct pin out for the netgear box. the netgear has 4 pins.. on mine, the white dot (pin 1) was 3.3V, then (pin 2) rx, (pin 3) tx, (pin 4 ground). so my reassembled plug ... 2 = yellow, 3 = orange, 4 = black, and the other 3 pins I seperately insulated each (pvc electrical tape) then taped them backwards out of the way. (Fluke kit is good for confirming what signalling is on which pins)
2) windows 7... this bit was easy... I plugged in the usb cable (1) and bingo... my pc went off to microsoft, found and installed properly tested signed and published drivers. thank you ftdichip. good job. once installed, via device manager I found that the usb device was now com3, and I set com3 to 115200 baud. 8n1.
3) windows 7.. hmm.. no terminal client any more... ok, thank you putty. 0.62 was current yesterday... not sure where to download from so I ended up on wikipedia, and followed links.
4) so to the wn802T-200... removing one of the tiny screws allowed the front face plate to slide down and be removed. revealing the circuit board. instructions from others' posts were to connect to the serial port and power up the pc before energising the wn802t-200. seemed to work for me.
5) in putty, connected to com3, 115200, etc... suddenly the access point is talking to me ! ok, I hit return a couple of times, and uboot gets interrupted. magic... light on the horizon...
6) commands I used: (don't use just yet, read to the end before trying anything)
- printenv
- help
- setenv ipaddr 192.168.....
- setenv serverip 192.168....
- run flash_kernel
- run flash_rootfs
- boot
7) I prepared a tftp server. so I use solarwinds's tftp server on an old windows xp laptop. took a little while to set a policy in symantec to open up udp 69 for tftp inbound traffic, but sorted.
8) ip addresses: seems wn802t-200 defaults to 192.168.0.233
but rather than mess around changing my local subnets, I found I could change the access point to a spare ip address on my build lan. hence my tftp server was simple to use.
9) I fetched from netgear.com the 2.0.2. version of the firmware, got to the .tar image, and then use winrar to unpack the tar file into 4 files, 2 images and 2 checksum counts. put the 4 files in the root directory of the tftp server.
10) then I did the commands in (6).
11) magically, putty tells me about all the progress, and a reboot, and... yay ! life returned to my access point. and the access point was back on http://192.168.0.233
12) not home run yet. I then had trouble getting back to my prefered settings on my chosen IP address.
13) this is where things were not perfect. 3.1.12 had messed something big up. I found doing a factory reset once on 2.0.2 helps restore base settings. then build a new profile, but interesting use a different end ip address. Every time I tried to use my originally assigned ip address, the box semi bricked again. not sure the issue here, but bypassing the problem sometimes is good enough. I guess there is some ghost of a corrupted profile not flushed by the factory reset maybe??
14) so my access point now boots, and seems to work like it did when I bought it some 3 years ago.
remember... No warranty, liability or support expectation of any kind is offered in by this post. If you kill your box, it's your problem. please remember static electricity protection and that electricity kills people as well as electronics, etc. if in any doubt you should consult a qualified, competent person before undertaking anything.
caveat emptor as they used to say in Rome...
2 Replies
- I have the exactly same problem, bricked my Access point while upgrading firmware to 3.1.12.
I did all the procedures same as yours. When I power the Access point, my putty console spills a lot of strange characters. I use 115200 8N1, no flow control and also make sure the com port also set up to 115200 8N1, no flow control. Is there anything that I need to set in putty configuration. The version I use is 0.62, same as yours. I can stop the booting process by either space bar or enter key.
Whenever I typed any key, putty console will spill out something but not corresponding to what I just typed. For example, when I hit the enter key, it shows C.
At this point, I tried to ping 192.168.0.233, but "Request time out", i.e, no response.
If the router has no response to ping, then there is no way to use tftp to write binary file to the Access point, isn't it.
When you "run flash-kernel" and "run flash-rootfs", your tftp server will do the file transfer through ethernet cable, and the serial interface is just used for command not file transfer, right?
Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you,
minlin - I didn’t make any specific changes to putty other than choosing ‘com3’ and setting the speed and settings for com3.
com3 was the com port allocated under windows 7 when I plugged the usb cable in.
On my pc the defaults for window, translation, remote character set is ‘ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe)’. Yours too ?
Some thoughts:
- I am using windows 7 64 bit ultimate.
- I’m in the United Kingdom, my settings are for UK English, etc.
- Are you sure your cable is serial ttl (3.3v) ?
- Is there any risk of electrical noise upsetting your connection?
Hope that helps.
