Recover a bricked Orbi RBR50 - flashing white light

[CR4]

I have an RBR50, which when I try to factory reset, the green power light stays on and will not turn red.

If i have the reset pressed whilst turning on the power, I get the solid red light for a few seconds, then a couple of flashes of the red light, then it turns green again.

i have followed the guides on flashing the firmware using tftp and nmrpflash, with no joy yet. - i suspect the reason is that my PC is not seeing the router.

I have tried connecting to all 3 of the ethernet ports.

I make a direct ethernet connection to my windows 11 PC and change my network adaptor settings to static, 192.168.1.10 with DNS at 192.168.1.1

if i try to ping 192.168.1.1 I get no response - although the network adaptor says it is connected.

Does this mean my lan ports on the router are nfg ?

[CR4 · Accepted solution]

Ok, solved it.

I took it apart, connected a USB to serial adapter, and through putty, discovered the mac address, model number and other settings had been wiped, in what I assume was a failed firmware update.

these were updated and firmware flashed successfully.

i wont include a link here, but there are lots of posts in this forum on how to do it.

[FURRYe38]

As last resort, try a 30-30-30 reset and see what happens.

Review these:

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/custom-firmware-build-for-orbi-rbk50-rbk53-rbr50-rbs50-v-9-2-5-1-1...
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Is-my-13-month-old-RBR50-bricked/td-p/2009904/jump-to/first-un...
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi-Wi-Fi-5-AC-and-Orbi-with/ORBI-RBR50v2-bricked-Solved/m-p/23380...

[CR4]

will give it a try - thx

[FURRYe38]

👍

[CR4]

i tried the 30 30 30 , with no change ☹️.

i tried several times again with nmrpflash, and on 2 occasions, got a connection, but got a timeout message.

Can anyone help me interpret this message please...

D:\Downloads\nmrpflash>nmrpflash -i net14 -f RBR50-V2.7.5.4.img
Waiting for Ethernet connection (Ctrl-C to skip).
Advertising NMRP server on net14 ... \
Received configuration request from 00:00:00:00:00:00.
Sending configuration: 10.164.183.253/24.
Received upload request: filename 'firmware'.
Uploading RBR50-V2.7.5.4.img ... Timeout while waiting for ACK(0)/OACK.

[CR4 · Accepted solution]

Ok, solved it.

I took it apart, connected a USB to serial adapter, and through putty, discovered the mac address, model number and other settings had been wiped, in what I assume was a failed firmware update.

these were updated and firmware flashed successfully.

i wont include a link here, but there are lots of posts in this forum on how to do it.

[FURRYe38]

Glad you got it working. Be sure to save off a back up configuration to file for safe keeping. Saves time if a reset is needed.
https://kb.netgear.com/000062080/How-do-I-back-up-the-configuration-settings-on-my-Orbi-WiFi-System
Enjoy. 📡

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/custom-firmware-build-for-orbi-rbk50-rbk53-rbr50-rbs50-v-9-2-5-1-1...
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Is-my-13-month-old-RBR50-bricked/td-p/2009904/jump-to/first-un...
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi-Wi-Fi-5-AC-and-Orbi-with/ORBI-RBR50v2-bricked-Solved/m-p/23380...