Wireless Router Debricking!

It was bound to happen sooner or later...after more than fifty successful upgrades of cheap little wireless routers to third party firmware, I finally bricked one. In this case, the firmware went into place perfectly. I ended up passing an invalid parameter to the bootloader and this caused the CPU to get stuck so early in the boot process that nothing other than direct communications over JTAG could help.

Before debricking any router, be prepared. Get to a forum where there are knowledgeable folks available to help you, be honest about what happened and follow instructions exactly. Almost anything can be recovered if you approach it intelligently and learn from the experience.

This router recovered to perfect health and to prove it, I uploaded this entire video through it.

In what has to be a delightfully ironic twist, these cut-down Linksys routers with the stock VxWorks based firmware are pretty unreliable as they run out of memory and crash after a few days. This doesn't get better over time, and lots of these little routers are in the landfill as a result. Although nobody can prove it, it is believed that Linksys cut the memory in these units to stop people running third party firmware on them. That's where the irony comes in--not only did the third party Linux based firmware authors adapt, they did a better job, producing stable and reliable firmware for these things.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• wireless
• router
• debricking
• JTAG
• dd-wrt
• firmware
• vxworks
• Linksys
• WRT54Gv5

[rb5235]

Is that connector on laptop and cable not a RS232 Serial DB25? Not Parallel...

[uxwbill]

@rb5235 It's really a parallel cable. This laptop has only a DB9 serial port.

When I think of doing things like this, I usually do think "serial" I/O.

[djcatdog525]

how do you tack it a part i have 1 and i need to open it\

[uxwbill]

@djcatdog525 It's a press-fit with clips that hold it together. I got mine apart by "squeezing" the grey plastic and carefully working the blue part loose. There are probably better ways to do this.

[bingyancai]

Uxwbill, does the jtag cable's parallel connector work with pci parallel card?

[uxwbill]

@bingyancai Yes, as long as the card itself works like a normal parallel port and shows up to the operating system you are using.

[rb5235]

@uxwbill Thanks for a fast reply. Yes I have done a little more reading and it sure is a parallel connector. Thanks! Bad thing now days on laptops they are gone, it's good to keep and old one running XP with these ports.

[gutordin]

@JoshsTechChannel I'm getting the same here.. i have a wrt160n.. did you make it work or still stucked like me?

[JoshsTechChannel]

Will this work on a Linksys WRT150N? The wireless light is off, the power light blinks, and there is no Internet access

[WolfPaw1986]

I need help getting the software to jtag my router.

[schr4nz]

DD-WRT is the BEST firmware on the planet, I upgraded my piece of crap dlink a few months ago, unfortunately I parted with it recently due to a superior all-in-one device.