SRR60 stuck in breathing white, cannot even factory reset
My SRR60 has been working fine for about 2 years, and yesterday it started to behave weird, network became very slow, so I gave it a power cycle.
Now it is stuck with forever blinking/breathing white ring, no connectivity at all.
Tried to factory reset, no response at all either.
Bad hardware? Corrpt firmware?
Anything I could try?
I cannot find instruction on how to get into tftp recovery mode, willing to try but suspect it wont work, since the reset button seems like not getting any response at all.
Re: SRR60 stuck in breathing white, cannot even factory reset
Sometimes it is worthwhile connecting a PC or laptop directly to the ISP modem, just to verify that the internet is really there.
Did the SRR60 come with a subscription to Netgear Insight? (we who purchased the residential version with its 90 days of "complimentary support" really envy customers who got a subscription to Insight (and obviously paid for it) Since the SRR60 is officially "End of Life", I'm not sure that a subscription will help. (sigh)
TFTP does not have to be "turned on". It is automatic. However....
TFTP is neither trivial nor convenient.
Both the router and the computer running TFTP have to disconnected from everything else and connected with an Ethernet cable. (A messy procedure sometimes.)
The computer must be set up with a static IP in the 192.168.x subnet range, subnet mask 255.255.255.0. (Anything besides 192.168.1.1 because that is reserved for the router.)
The firmware file has to be downloaded from Netgear support (in this case https://www.netgear.com/support/product/SRR60.aspx#download ) and the zip file unpacked to extract the firmware image file. (oops, that has to be done before disconnecting from the network.)
The TFTP software needs to be running (did that get loaded before disconnecting from the network?) and set up to transfer the correct image file to 192.168.1.1
Power up the router, say a prayer, and hit Transfer.
There is a specific window of time when the router listens for a TFTP connection. Too early and it doesn't work. Miss the window by 1 second, and it doesn't work.
If nothing happens, power the router off, count to 10, and power it back on to try again. My record is six tries. I was so mad after 5 failures that I was ready to get out a hammer and reduce the router to pieces. Then by "more patient angel" said to try it a couple more times. Damn. image file transferred and router came up with the firmware loaded on it. Once I connected the PC web browser to 192.168.1.1 (user name "admin" password "password") and saw it took, then all that cabling and static IP has to be undone.
Re: SRR60 stuck in breathing white, cannot even factory reset
I was wrong about never being able to ping 192.168.1.1, with shorter timeout, I actually caught about 2 seconds time window that the srr60 was pingable, I immediately hit tftp command but seems like not much happening, will try a few more times.
What is the symptom of tftp not actually working? Do you know how many seconds after power on would tftp be active?
Re: SRR60 stuck in breathing white, cannot even factory reset
The symptom for me was "nothing happened". I just tried different delays. Hit power, wait 1 sec. Turn off. Reset TFTP program. Turn on. Wait 2 sec. Honestly, I was losing patience and reaching for the hammer when it finally worked.
Re: SRR60 stuck in breathing white, cannot even factory reset
I tried different wait times as well, many many times and no traffic shows up.
Then I found this interesting utility: https://github.com/jclehner/nmrpflash It did do some magic, was able to detect Ethernet, advertise nmrp, get request and start uploading, and then fails 😞
All these kind of confirms my hardware, specifically the switching chip maybe busted for whatever reason.
