Bricked TP-Link 1043nd

[StingRay]

I fixed a v2 WR1043ND for someone.. maybe the OP??

Just thought I should contribute something to the forum here. Since I have really enjoyed Gargoyle for almost as long as it has been around.

I tend to be a whirlpool troglodyte.. so I posted the method there.

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-r ... ?t=2518254

But I reproduce it here.

This is a v2 that was flashed to v3 firmware.. by mistake.
The result was no ethernet at all, no wireless. No access on any port.
LED power, system and WPS.. solid green and unchanging. Ethernet does not come on at all.. though in console the port is aware of the connection.
No response to pings.. no recovery state.
All attempts at recovery without soldering were attempted and failed.. by owner and myself.

Solution was easy (at least I have done worse).. just took me a long time to work out all the commands.

1. Solder in serial port.
https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr1043nd#serial

Pinouts and soldering were easy as the holes are not filled with solder.. only the ground one is slow to heat up sufficient area.

2. Plug into computer using a suitable TTL-Serial cable. USB is easiest and cheapest. Use a suitable console.. putty on PC.. I used coolterm on mac.
Set speed etc.. boot the router so you can see the boot messages.

In this case the boot went fine.. it actually checked out perfectly.. it is clear the error was a switch driver because the ifconfig in the console gives all the right values.

3. Here is the tricky part..
With no ethernet and no wireless how to get the firmware in.. well easy peasy.. copy it to USB stick. Plug the USB stick into the router.. (you need to use a noboot or header removed firmware)

There is a download in the openwrt wiki to help you. This is v2 .. do not use for anything else.
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=down ... Ws5dVBTOHc

But it is easy to cut the header off as well.. I changed the name on the usb stick.. rename it tplink.bin
Went back to the original TP-Link firmware which always seem to be a good idea.

4. Find the USB file in console of the router.. this is tricky part to find where it mounted.

Locate the file here.

root@Gargoyle:/dev# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 832.0K 264.0K 568.0K 32% /
/dev/root 6.0M 6.0M 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 29.9M 80.0K 29.8M 0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3 832.0K 264.0K 568.0K 32% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 832.0K 264.0K 568.0K 32% /
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
/dev/sda1 7.4G 8.6M 7.4G 0% /tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409

Go to the directory with the firmware..

root@Gargoyle:/dev# cd /tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409
root@Gargoyle:/tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409#
root@Gargoyle:/tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409# ls
.[1;32mtplink.bin.[0m
root@Gargoyle:/tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409#
root@Gargoyle:/tmp/usb_mount/FD84-1409#

Use the sysupgrade command.

sysupgrade tplink.bin

In this case it failed because the guy flashed a v3 firmware to a v2 WR1043ND and so the names don't match.

I was forced to use the

mtd -r write tplink.bin firmware

This is able to flash without caring about the version.. so make sure you get the right one.

So in the end this was actually fairly easy to do.

4. Once back to TP-Link OEM firmware, I flashed to Gargoyle again using the factory update.. easy peasy.

All this is based on all the excellent work in the openwrt wiki.

I am a bit surprised people don't use the USB method more often.. although it is obviously only useful if the firmware is running and has the USB mount setup already.

If this failed I was going to stop the boot and type tpl to get into the bootloader but as noted in the openwrt wiki the update by tftp by direct command is the most dangerous and with these serial flash chips and no way to repair a bootloader without removing the chip.. I thought it better to work from inside the basically working firmware.

Soldering in serial is essential though.. there was no other way in.

Finding how to get access to the storage.
https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/storage

[Lantis]

Fantastic contribution