[SOLVED] bricked a wrt54gl

[tuxfragbait]

This may help people playing with Gargoyle

I downloaded the bin file for Gargoyle, gargoyle_1.4.6-wrt54g-squashfs.bin, for my Linksys wrt54gl.

* Under the website I did a firmware upgrade.
* Would appear that I ended up with a brick.
* Power light flashes no ping response on 192.168.1.1
* Did a hard reset, no luck
* Did the 30-30-30 thing no luck.
* Did a tftp reinstall of the firmware (see my link to post below) to try and get the original firmware back on the router.
* This is where it got interesting!
* I entered: put WRT54GL_FW_4.30.14.005_20091026.bin
* Put the power back in to the router.
* Got lots of sent WRQ <file=WRT54GL_FW_4.30.14.005_20091026.bin, mode=octet>, but no upload.
* And I started getting ping responses.
* http://192.168.1.1 did not work though.
* So did the put again, still no upload but ping responses stopped and then started again.
* I was busy and went off and did something else for 15 minutes. Came back and thought I'd try the website again.
* 192.168.1.1 came up with time with Gargoyle.
* Things may differ, you may need a power off as well.

This is from my blog post on unbircking wrt54
http://flash.school.nz/?p=172

[mix]

Your instructions are a joke right? You tried to put the original linksys firmware back on it because you thought it was bricked, and apparently you failed at that too. You actually found out that the gargoyle firmware was loaded correctly, but you just didn't give it enough time to load. There is no way you uploaded the original firmware by tftp to the router and instead got the gargoyle firmware. Sorry it doesn't work that way.

[tuxfragbait]

Thanks for the flame Mix, always nice to meet the informed.
Not implying that I got the Gargoyle installed via tftp.
But rather that after a firmware install that left me with an unresponsive router, multiple reboot, nice little wait periods and 30-30-30, no ping, no http.

While trying to recover what appeared to be a brick, I no longer have a brick, I now have Gargoyle.

[pbix]

tuxfragbait,
For the benefit of others who might read this the WRT54GL is rather pokey by modern standards and while it does work with Gargoyle firmware loads and configuration saves are slow and require much patience by the users.

Looking at what you did I think your first mistake was near the top of your list. Its important to understand that uploading the firmware is different than saving the firmware to flash. On the WRT54GL the saving process is indicated by the flashing LED and takes around 5 minutes and even more in a router with more worn FLASH because the CPU may have to write each sector several times to make it stick. During the save process your router will be completely unresponsive. Powering it off during this period will mean your flash will be corrupted.

But even with corrupted flash you can recover through the boot loader and TFTP as you did.

Glad you were finally able to get it loaded.

[mix]

Thanks for the flame Mix, always nice to meet the informed.

Here is some more inform-ation. After you flash the firmware on a wrt54gl, the first time you reboot the router it will format partitions, create filesystems, create files, etc. This process takes in excess of 3 minutes. The power light will rapidly blink during this time. If you turn off your router, perform a 30-30-30 reset (which is useless and does nothing with openwrt) or any other method to interrupt this process, it will just start over from the beginning the next time the router is rebooted.