can't restore firmware on wrt54gl

[duck071]

First hi all.

i want to thank everybody working on this firmware as it is great.

I've used gargoyle several time in the past on these lynksys routers to set them up as wireless repeaters, i allways found gargoyle to be the best firmware to easily configure this hardware as a repeater.

what happened is i haven't used wrt54gl in a while as it is really old as hardware until yesterday.

I had to configure a repeater for a customer who didn't want to spend too much money, i found on my storage an old second handed wrt54gl v1.1 and said: hell yeah let's do this.

My bad for not reading that 1.60 version of gargoyle is way to heavy for it.

What happened is i uploaded the firmware via browser, then waited the usual long amount of time for the router to reboot and happily logged into gargoyle web interface to set it up.

I was used to the slow pace of this firmware, but it was ok, only this time the router had several problem at keeping it up, making allmost impossible to work with it. Wi-fi is buggy and it really couldn't do for what i had in mind.

So i tried to upload another firmware from the web interface(i tried with stock, miniwrt, tomato) but the result is allways the same: the gui get stuck in "uploading firmware" and won't move from there no matter what(i waited for a reasonable time, let's say 45 minutes).

the router isn't brickd as i allways manage to perform factory resets, and re-enter the web gui but it looks like gargoyle took possession of the router and don't want to let it go.

So i've cruised around this forum and others to try and solve this and supposedly i've read that when this happens it's because the ram gets full before the upload complete and instead of saying anything about it, it just sits there.

Next i tried to restore using tftp. What i did was setting 2 command prompt, one with ping -t 192.168.1.1 and another with the tftp command with the stock firmware ready to go. I did reset the router and waited for the brief time in wich it was supposed to accept the firmware.

Now the boot is really slower than it should be(it takes 3-4 minutes, sometime more to get reachable from web gui) but strangely enough this condition never verified, meaning it goes from not being reachable through pings to being loaded allready, giving me a timout on tftp command(no matter if i tried launching it before the pings came through or immediatly after).

I managed to open SSh connection and log me in with winSCP, and sent the 3 commands i found on this very forum to enable the wait on boot time, but sadly this didn't work. The router still goes from not being reachable at all to fully loaded and accessible from webgui.

i also tried using various utility that keeps hammering for the tftp several times and set them on running from the moment the router is plugged to the ac on, but i allways get time out error.

I've heard about the possibility of flashing through ssh.

The thing is, i'm a complete noob about it and i don't know if it can be done from WinSCP.

Anyone has an idea of what i should do at this point?

[duck071]

Update: i finally made it.

The problem was exactly what i though. Not enough space to make the update.

after a couple of days of every kind of try i finally managed to come to a way to solve the issue.

Time to share for the sake of it:

What i did was logging with winSCP inside the root directory, and manually transfer the tomato.trx file (not the bin but the TRX as the update command do not accept bin extension) into the tmp directory

then i ran "sysupdate -n -v tomato.trx".

This finally sent the router into a brick state with flashing power led.

I was really pleased when after a ping i got a response with ttl=100 in a permanent fashion, leading me to think that i could have been finally able to use the tftp command.

i then proceeded to do a regular tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put firmware.bin and after 2 minutes: bam i had my router back.

cheers

[trinetra]

Hi, thank you so much for your post. I'm having the same issue - a 'possessed' Gargoyle installation on a WRT54GL and I just can't remove it. Unfortunately when I SCP'd into the router and tried to copy tomato.trx into the/root/ folder, I got an error saying there's insufficient space to copy the file. Any ideas as to what I could do in this situation?
Thank you

[AndyHiggins]

You need to save the firmware file to the /tmp directory. See the following post