Gargoyle Forum

Thanks so much for your help both. Within 30 mins of posting on the OpenWRT forums someone came back and showed me how to reset the u-boot env and after a further 30 minutes of sweating the router is now back up and running

Well done!
Can you post how did you do that please? Some users may need this information in future

Sure

The symptoms were that observing the boot sequence in a serial connection the sequence hung before getting the option to hit "F" to enter failsafe mode (see OpenWRT wiki re failsafe mode)

Sera on the OpenWRT forum suggested I do the following having rebooted the router with a serial connection and aborting the Autoboot sequence.

At the Marvell>> prompt issue the following commands -

env default -a
saveenv
reset

When the router reboots, abort the Autoboot sequence again and connect the router to a pc (leave the serial connection connected)

In the serial terminal set the ip address of the router to 192.168.1.1 and the tftp server to 192.168.1.2 by issuing

setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.1
setenv serverip 192.168.1.2

On the pc set the network card address to 192.168.1.2 and launch your favourite tftp server package

Put the image you want to flash in the tftp server directory

In the serial console issue the command

run flash_pri_image

It will probably fail and tell you the filename XXXXXXX.img doesn't exist on the server. Change the image file on the pc to the name in the error message and reissue

run flash_pri_image

This time you should see the image loading in the serial console. When it is complete and you return to the marvell>> prompt reboot the router.

Then follow the openwrt guidelines for firstboot in the serial console and you should be back in business.