Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 3:59 Post subject: The DEBRICKING of Netgear R8500
Firstly, I thank you many for your contributions. In particular, KONG for his works on this router and on others such as R7000. I owe him a donation or two. Being a student is tough on money.
I'd like to share my experience in attempting to debrick Netgear R8500 in this thread. I do hope we gain a better collective understanding of R8500 in the end.
Some background:
I acquired a non-working and cheap Netgear R8500-NAS (made in Vietnam, 272-12473-02). I have done nearly 20 flashings at this point! I am also a Beta tester for several of Netgear products. I can honestly say Netgear hardware specs are reasonably good on those that I tested including R7000 and Orbi. But its software department is well below par. I told them that although in a gentle way so as not to upset anybody, if you know what I mean. The R8500 issues are perhaps indicative of my observations here. BTW, I did not beta-test R8500.
With that out of the way, here are what I did:
Sequence:
- My initial flashing of R8500 with KONG's dd-wrt for brought R8500 back to life from a solid amber power light indicator. But whatever KONG's version I tried, the radio remained OFF, i.e. No wifi.
- Flashing Netgear stock FW for R8500 did not bring R8500 back to life.
- So nothing to loose at this stage, I tried stock FW for R8300. But R8500 refused to play ball.
... A few hairs turned grey. A day and half later with some enforced breaks to regain my insanity....
More research ... I came across the thread of 'Bricked R8500?' in which KONG suggestion of inserting a Power Off and Power On in between @CFE commands of 'nvram erase' and 'TFTPD'. And suddenly my radio was miraculously turned on. Don't laugh on my quick feeling of a bit like... Marie Curie discovering Uranium! It's all relative, I am told.
- However, only 2.4GHZ and one 5GHz channels are available. Second 5GHz is missing. My thought, oh well.....
- But after updating to KONG's dd-wrt r34320M, 2.4 GHz also disappears . Flashing it back to r33675M does not bring 2.4GHz back.
Observation:
One thing I learned is that after a successful TFTP transfer, I simply wait for PuTTY process to complete its process. This way, I know for sure that the flashing has fully completed on the router's nvram.
At this point, I am kinda in a state of multipolar feelings: Happy and Confused. Happy for I brought R8500 back to life. Confused for not knowing why only one 5GHz is available while all wifi indicator lights lit up!
Please chime in, if you know something.
Wishing you all a good day. And sorry for the long post.
(P.S. After 20 flashings or so, I lost track of any logs in particular, in case anybody asks for it.)
There are so many of these faulty r8500 being sold on eBay. I have bought 5 trying to receive them.
I've had to unbrick them using serial recovery. Some stay in a reboot loop, others work with either both 5ghz radios not working or the 2.4ghz radio not working.
Badly designed hardware. _________________ I am far from a guru, I'm barely a novice.
There are so many of these faulty r8500 being sold on eBay. I have bought 5 trying to receive them.
I've had to unbrick them using serial recovery. Some stay in a reboot loop, others work with either both 5ghz radios not working or the 2.4ghz radio not working.
Badly designed hardware.
Your five units of R8500 with varying post-boot states indicate clearly to me that I should cut my losses with Netgear R8500, and move on.
There are so many of these faulty r8500 being sold on eBay. I have bought 5 trying to receive them.
I've had to unbrick them using serial recovery. Some stay in a reboot loop, others work with either both 5ghz radios not working or the 2.4ghz radio not working.
Badly designed hardware.
Absolute truth. I think Netgear is ripe for a class action. The hardware fault is in the chips not sure I think Vietnam based chips corrupt I get what looks like write buffer issues from the DDWRT loading... It just boot loops with any Netgear firmwares. I believe a write buffer overflow hack initiated the firmware security update also lol.
What process did you go through to unbrick via serial port and what firmware did you have success with? I am trying and get putty to connect but have only once had the firmware upload and it wont take.
got same issue. successfully installed Kong's DD-WRT on my Netgear R8500.
but unfortunately 1 5ghz radios seems not working (the one with higher bandwith channel above 100)
already tried to re-flash and nvram erase or 30/30/30 and flash another version of DD-WRT, but have the same issue.
here are my screenshot.
also i can provide the CFE logs if needed.
what i see is wl: unsupported
and wl: driver not found something like that.
I have been reading all of the threads about this. Kong was mentioning that it might be caused by missing nvram values. Does anyone know what values they are? They can be set via CFE if we know what we need to set.
Hopefully it is that easy. Probably won't be though.
I have tried a thousand times without success to compile the real initial version of the firmware (1.0.0.20 not the 1.0.0.2 that apparently is bigger than the rest, has anyone tried it? this version is not even in the official firmware downloads of the netgear page, only in the development section...
what are you doing to try to compile it? Are you using Linux?
Also did you follow the instructions in the zip file?
I too got an error. Looks like it is an easy fix though. edit
edit timeconst.pl in the kernel R8500-V1.0.0.20_1.0.11_src/components/opensource/linux/linux-2.6.36/kernel folder remove the line with the - and add the line with the + then it should start to compile. I ran into another error that I will try to work out and will post back.
that apparently is bigger than the rest, has anyone tried it? this version is not even in the official firmware downloads of the netgear page, only in the development section...