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Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Joey17
Tutor

Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

A week ago my Orbi mesh network completely went down (an RBR50 with 2 RBS50 satellites). The RBR50 was pulsing white and the network could not be found in any of my devices. I believe the satellietes were solid magenta at that time I'm not 100% sure. The issue was definitely with the Orbi routers because I was able to get the wifi working again by disconnecting the Orbi's and just using my xfinity router by itself. However, I still haven't been able to get the Orbi mesh network working again.

 

I tried all the standard ways troubleshooting methods I could think of (rebooting, factory reset, swapping power cords with the satelite). Most of this troubleshoting has been done without the satellites plugged in just so I can see if I get the RBR50 working by itself. Despite multiple attempts at factory resetting, the RBR50 never gets past the stage of pulsing white and the default network never appears (it blinks white for about a minute after starting up and then switches to slowly pulsing white, but never gets past that). 

 

The power LED is always solid green after it turns on. It responds to factory reset attempts as expected (solid amber for a few seconds, then blinks amber). But it the behavior is still always the same afterward. I've also tried using TFTP multiple times to flash older firmware versions on the router, but as with the resets it never ends up changing the behavior of the router. The TFTP flashing might not be working properly though because the router doesn't respond quite as described in posts such as this. That post describes that the power LED should turn solid amber then blink amber when holding the reset button while power cycling the router, but my routed is solid red and the blinking red rather than amber. The power LED also immediately goes dark when the transfer starts, and the router doesn't turn back on by itself. So it seems quite possible the router is just crashing as soon as the TFTP transfer starts. My computer does report however that all the bytes were transferred successfuly.

 

Are there any other things that would be worthwile for me to try? The next thing I'm planning on trying is to connect directly serial ports next as described here and see if that yeilds any useful results.

 

My router is just over a year old so the warrenty isn't valid anymore. Really sucks to have such an expensive router bite it after such a short amount of time.

Model: RBR50|Orbi AC3000 Tri-band WiFi Router
Message 1 of 14
FURRYe38
Guru

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Can you access the RBRs web page with a wire connected PC pointed to 192.168.1.1 after the reset button press of 15 seconds then release? 

 

If TFTP didn't work, then try the other recovery you linked. If that fails, then your RBR needs to be replaced. 

Message 2 of 14
FURRYe38
Guru

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

If you get into the RBRs web page, what FW is currently loaded? 

Message 3 of 14
Joey17
Tutor

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

No, I've tried accessing the the web page at 192.168.1.1 via ethernet many times throughout the process and never been able to reach it. Will try connecting to the serial port and see what I can do.

Message 4 of 14
FURRYe38
Guru

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Let us know if that works for you. 

 

Message 5 of 14
Joey17
Tutor

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Connecting to the serial ports at least gave me a bit more information about the problem. It looks like there's something corrupted about the OpenWrt image because it runs into an error verifying the checksum:

 

## Checking Image at 843bffc0 ...
   Legacy image found
   Image Name:   ARM OpenWrt Linux-3.14.77
   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (lzma compressed)
   Data Size:    39061504 Bytes = 37.3 MiB
   Load Address: 40908000
   Entry Point:  40908000
   Verifying Checksum ...    Bad Data CRC
rootfs checksum error

## Booting kernel from FIT Image at 84000000 ...
   Using 'config@1' configuration
   Trying 'kernel@1' kernel subimage
     Description:  ARM OpenWrt Linux-3.14.77
     Type:         Kernel Image
     Compression:  gzip compressed
     Data Start:   0x840000e4
     Data Size:    3523429 Bytes = 3.4 MiB
     Architecture: ARM
     OS:           Linux
     Load Address: 0x80208000
     Entry Point:  0x80208000
     Hash algo:    crc32
     Hash value:   8b1e9c99
     Hash algo:    sha1
     Hash value:   d3b5236481fead36da4d4b1da5363d14b5fb553e
   Verifying Hash Integrity ... crc32 error!
Bad hash value for 'hash@1' hash node in 'kernel@1' image node
Bad Data Hash

Is there a way to reinstall OpenWrt? I'm assuming the standard TFTP firware updates don't update OpenWrt but correct me if I'm wrong. Using TFTP to upload a new firmware version doesn't change this error message.

Message 6 of 14
FURRYe38
Guru

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

You might send @pbarham a message and see if he can help out on this. Hes the one that got is running. Don't know if his was currupt in the same way or not. 

Message 7 of 14
pbarham
Apprentice

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing


@Joey17 wrote:

Connecting to the serial ports at least gave me a bit more information about the problem. It looks like there's something corrupted about the OpenWrt image because it runs into an error verifying the checksum:

Is there a way to reinstall OpenWrt? I'm assuming the standard TFTP firware updates don't update OpenWrt but correct me if I'm wrong. Using TFTP to upload a new firmware version doesn't change this error message.


As far as I understand it, the `fw_reccovery` command of the U-Boot console should upload a firmware image (from the netgear site) that includes the OpenWrt firmware and various other firmware blobs that seem to be used for radio interfaces.  (at least, that's what the log output seemed to show)   But - just because you sent an image from a laptiop dooesn't necessarily mean the router will accept it!

 

What I did to recover my router was:

1) Press a key on the serial console to interrupt the boot process and drop you into the U-boot command line

2) There you can poke around and examine the various config settings (`board_data_show` and various related commands)

3) You can start a tftp server that will accept a firmware image and write it to the flash memory using the `fw_recovery` command. It will tell you the IP address it's listening on (whichi was 192.168.1.250 for my router!) and you'll see logging when it receives data .

4) You can get u-boot to check out the image and validate it using the `bootdni` command (this will show your the kernel, openwrt versions etc)

 

What console output do you get from step 3) ?  The first few times I tried this the update process complained that the new firmware image wasn't valid for the device.  This was because the hardware id and model id had been corrupted in the config memory.  I got error messages telling me what was expected and what was found.  I couldn't upload the new image successfully until I'd fixed all these.

 

[I wrote a post with more detailed info in the thread that you linked to in an earlier message.]

 

I also at one point found some relevant threads on an OpenWrt hacking site suggesting that the U-boot firmware can run diagnostic tests on your flash memory to see if the chip is damaged (I expect this is unlikely)

 

 

 

 

 

Message 8 of 14
pbarham
Apprentice

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing


@pbarham wrote:

The first few times I tried this the update process complained that the new firmware image wasn't valid for the device.  This was because the hardware id and model id had been corrupted in the config memory.  I got error messages telling me what was expected and what was found.  I couldn't upload the new image successfully until I'd fixed all these.

To clarify ... as far as the tftp client on my laptop was concerned, the firmware file had been sent (PUT) to the router successuflly.  But the router was failing to validate the image file and refusing write it to the flash.   It's impossible to tell whether this is happening without looking at the serial console output!    (three things were going wrong for me .... not setting 'binary mode' on the TFTP transfer, and the router not believing that it was the correct image file ... for two different reasons)

 

So long as you're happy you have the correct firmware image from Netgear for your router (RBR50 vs RBR50v2), you can just set the router's hardware ID to the ID that the firmarare image file contains and the error messages go away.  Once the firmware is written to flash succesfully you should (hopefully) see different behavior after a reset.

 

Of course, there may be something totally differnt happening in your case - but from what I read on the OpenWrt sites, it's pretty hard to get the router into a totally unreoverable state.  So long as U-boot it working you ought to be able to get things back (so long as there's no actiual hardware failure).

 

The uboot help command shows commands callled 'nand' and 'mmc' that I think are the ones where the tests and utilities live for the flash.  The firmware gets uploaded to the MMC memory.  

Message 9 of 14
Joey17
Tutor

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Thanks @pbarham! That's all very helpful.

 

I've gotten farther now in some ways, but still have a some new issues that have surfaced. Using the `fw_recovery` command worked well and it didn't seem to have any problems accepting the firmware image over tftp. I was able to access the Orbi webpage after that for the first time in this whole process. Interestingly the web page showed it was running firmware version 2.3.5.30 even though the version I transfered via tftp was 2.7.1.60. And it still remembered the SSID even though I had factory reset it many times during this process.

 

Overall though it seemed to be funtioning well at this point. I could connect to the network from one of my devices and the router was connecting to one of my satellites. I wasn't connected to my modem though, so I couldn't test the actual internet connection . Once I did move it back near the modem and connect it failed to boot up again though, with the same checksum validation error as before. As before, I used the `fw_recovery` command and it got past the chesum validation error, but eventually ran into a new error:

 

 Mission mode: Firmware CHIP Version -1610612717
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: Firmware loaded from user helper succesfully
ol_swap_seg_alloc: Successfully allocated memory for SWAP size=262144
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: Firmware loaded from user helper succesfully
Swap: bytes_left to copy: fw:16; dma_page:101685
Swap: wrong length read:0
ol_swap_wlan_memory_expansion: Swap total_bytes copied: 160459 Target address 417c40
scn=dbac04c0  target_write_addr=417c40 seg_info=deb29a10
ol_transfer_swap_struct:Code swap structure successfully downloaded for bin type =2
bin_filename=IPQ4019/hw.1/athwlan.bin swap_filename=/lib/firmware/IPQ4019/hw.1/athwlan.codeswap.bin
ol_transfer_bin_file: Downloading firmware file: IPQ4019/hw.1/athwlan.bin
SQUASHFS error: xz decompression failed, data probably corrupt
SQUASHFS error: squashfs_read_data failed to read block 0xc42c0d
SQUASHFS error: xz decompression failed, data probably corrupt
SQUASHFS error: squashfs_read_data failed to read block 0xc42c0d
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: firmware, attempted to load /lib/firmware/IPQ4019/hw.1/athwlan.bin, but failed with error -5
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: Direct firmware load failed with error -5
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: Falling back to user helper
SQUASHFS error: xz decompression failed, data probably corrupt
SQUASHFS error: squashfs_read_data failed to read block 0xc42c0d
ath10k_ahb a000000.wifi: Firmware loaded from user helper succesfully
ol_transfer_bin_file: Failed to get IPQ4019/hw.1/athwlan.bin
ol_ath_download_firmware : ol_transfer_bin_file failed. phase:3
 ol_ath_attach error status -1

Though upon retrying now I'm not even getting this far. Now I'm strangly struggling to even turn on the router successfully. The power LED always turns green, but most of the time the LED ring isn't lighting up and no output gets transmitted over the serial connection. It does successfully turn on maybe one out of every 20 or so attempts, but even when it does it goes back to that original checksum error and if I try the tftp upload, it hangs at the step of resetting the cpu immediately after rebooting. 

 

One time the LED ring started flashing green and I got this kernal panic message which potentially indicates a hardware problem:

@@@@@@@@@ DNI Kernel panic @@@@@@@@@@
mmc0: Starting tests of card mmc0:0001...
mmc0: Test case 3. Basic read (with data verification)...
mmc_test_verify_read_____dni_panic_flag1
mmc0: Result: OK
mmc0: Tests completed.
console_panic_event_________write 1 times
mmc0: Starting tests of card mmc0:0001...
mmc0: Test case 2. Basic write (with data verification)...
mmc0: Result: ERROR (-22)
mmc0: Tests completed.
mmc0: Starting tests of card mmc0:0001...
mmc0: Test case 5. Basic proc write (with data verification)...
mmc0: Result: ERROR (-22)
mmc0: Tests completed.
Message 10 of 14
pbarham
Apprentice

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Unfortunately, that's all starting to look like a genuine hardware fault to me.  The log messages suggest that it's having trouble reliably writing the MMC flash chip.  

 

If it were me, I'd try to find some low level flash read/write test commands in the 'mmc' part of the uboot console and see if those pass.  If not, then then your next steps probably depend on how comfortable you are with electronics and soldering ;-(    I expect that the chip would be a small surface mount part - so *really* hard to desolder and replace.  There might be some dry joints on the legs or on a nearby capacitor ... but I doubt that I'd have the confidence to work on that myself given the limited tools I have access to at home.

 

Like you, I'm also a little suspicious of the firmware version mismatch when you got it to boot.  That does suggest one possibility....  you'll note that there are actually two fw_recovery commands and there is another oommand (I can't remember its name) to set the 'boot partition'.  It may be the case that the boot loader allows for two sets of firmware and you can configure which one is booted.  You *may* be successfully updating one, but booting the one that's still corrupt?  

 

 (also, if you do manage to get access to the web interface again, then you could try to do a fw update via that.  )

 

Long shots, I know...

 

Another hail Mary, if it's an unrepariable hardware fault, would be to buy a cheap 'broken' RBR50 from ebay and see it you can recover *that* one!  (I'm sure most ppl give up and sell theirs for parts!)

 

Good luck!

P

Message 11 of 14
Joey17
Tutor

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Thanks again for all your help @pbarham . I unfortunately didn't get it working again... I'm pretty convinced that it's a hardware failure at this point that it was in fact a hardware failure 😞

 

Oh well, at least I learned a lot trying to fix it. Your suggestions definitely helped me get a lot further than I would have otherwise so I really appreciate it!

Message 12 of 14
pbarham
Apprentice

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing


@Joey17 wrote:

Thanks again for all your help @pbarham . I unfortunately didn't get it working again... I'm pretty convinced that it's a hardware failure at this point that it was in fact a hardware failure 😞

 

Oh well, at least I learned a lot trying to fix it. Your suggestions definitely helped me get a lot further than I would have otherwise so I really appreciate it!


Sorry to hear that, but it's certainly worth a try.  (hopefully you didn't spend too much money discovering it was toast!)  

I always live in hope that some Netgear employee will take pity on those folks who end up with a brick shortly after their warranty expires. 

Message 13 of 14
FURRYe38
Guru

Re: Orbi RBR50 Pulsing White and no Network Appearing

Always worth contacting a forum moderator to see what the options are. Smiley Wink

Message 14 of 14
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