Yep, perkinma's sounds like a different problem. My router (and at least 2 owned by others, it seems) just had the WAN and LAN wired ports die - absolutely everything else was working normally.
That being the case, my fall-back - in case flashing the D-Link f/w back on failed (as I'd never done that before using only wifi) - was to just turn off all wifi, save and reboot. My reasoning is, that there would have been no easily externally observable difference [*] between a brick and my router (even though the p/s, CPU, memory, etc. were all working). And I'd hope they wouldn't bother fixing/investigating a $40 product. Is there a flaw in this theory?
Fortunately, flashing the factory f/w worked in my case, and D-Link replaced the router.
[*] Except it could have served as a desktop coffee cup warmer - probably the wired network chip cooking!
I just experienced this same issue. One random day after months of perfect operation the WAN/LAN ports died. It was running BrainSlayers port of DD-WRT from Jan 2013. This is actually a DIR-835 A1, but this issue sounds identical.
Not even considering if WiFi worked I did the 30/30/30 which is useless without LAN ports.
How do I connect to it via WiFi at this point? Being that I have factory reset the router I don't even see it show up in the list of Wifi connections.
Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 18:26 Post subject: how did you flash back to factory?
hi
i am having the same issue with my dir-825 hw. ver c1.
how were you ble to flash to factory if you have no lan ports to connect to??
would hope to hear from you as i need to return to factory before i attempt to try approaching the local distributor.
does anyone have a ddwrt to factory firmware for the c1??
Posted: Mon Aug 05, 2013 17:15 Post subject: i do not know what had happened but my router is back
thank you for your quick reply.
i connected via telnet. tried to copy dlink firmware to tmp without success(the guide reffers to wget command to download from the web and i wanted to copy the bin file from my pc). tried connecting via ssh
and left it connected to the modem over night.
in the morning i saw that i got a gateway ip it seems that the router was working as a switch.
i did a reset into firmware recovery mode and i succeeded.
loaded the dlink firmware -the instructions should have been more clear as to keep waiting and not restart the router -this would result ddwrt firmware.
also important when you assign an ip manualy choose 192.168.0.100 and above so after to load the firmware it would be within the default dlink ip addresses.
for now i will run dlink firmware to see whats happening.
i suspect that the switch chip is overclocked in the ddwrt firmware or makes it work close to its limits which might be what is causing the problem (this is pure speculation, i have no hard evidence. but the warming of the router, reported by others also, gives some clues or a direction in investigating this issue.
i think it would be most welcomed if you could publish a guide as to doing what you did including relevant commands, so others with less skills could try and rescue their router
best regards
The replacement DI-835 just lost its WAN & LAN ports again. This is totally unacceptable. If I knew their products were this crappy I never would have bought one.
Is this happening in just the DI-825/835, or are other models affected? Obviously there is a problem chip being used in these models, I want to try to get Dlink to give me a different model that doesn't use this chip rather than another DI-835 that at this point I will never trust to put in my business based on this track record. I'd even consider a downgrade to a 6xx router if I knew it used a different chip.
If Dlink doesn't help me out in some way for suffering the same problem twice within a couple months they'll be added to my "never buy again" list.
Turns out it is even worse than that. I went to put the factory firmware back on it and found the LAN ports are working again (after sitting unplugged for a day) So now I can't send it back since they'll tell me it works fine, but I can't trust it to keep working. I own a paperweight.
Ok, so it's been a while but i've got a replacement router, dir825c (same as original).
The original router, as you would know had symptoms very similar to what alot of people have been reporting here.
In the end I connected to telnet through wireless (since LAN wasnt working) and used the command : "erase mtd nvram" (the code removes everything, making it a brick)
I then sent it back and got a replacement easy, not sure if I needed to use the command but thats that.
boun11 wrote:
i suspect that the switch chip is overclocked in the ddwrt firmware or makes it work close to its limits which might be what is causing the problem (this is pure speculation, i have no hard evidence. but the warming of the router, reported by others also, gives some clues or a direction in investigating this issue.
I also have this thought, more so now than before I sent mine back due to the amount of people reporting the exact same problem. When I first had this issue I couldnt find a single person with the exact same problem, which is why I made this thread. Since then only people with the problem (that I know of) have ALSO flashed ddwrt.
slice1900 wrote:
Never buying a Dlink product again.
Although it sucks, you did agree to void your warranty when you flashed ddwrt in the first place, even if the problem is their fault, it's not their issue.
Going back a couple pages I found at least 4 threads dealing with dead LAN/WAN ports on DI-825 & DI-835 routers, from people who report running stock firmware. It clearly is not "DD-WRT overclocking the LAN ports". It is a hardware problem, these routers have a design defect.
Hey, I had an idea what I can do with my DI-835 since I don't feel like it is trustworthy to use any longer. Maybe the DD-WRT team could use it as a hardware donation. Do they keep a list of hardware they need or they already have and don't need anywhere? Probably no point in shipping them this if they already have one, but if they don't the fact the LAN/WAN ports are intermittently flaky should not impede its usefulness in helping them improve the DD-WRT port on this router.
