Friday, December 25, 2009

how to reflash la fonera with ddwrt

Recovery of a non-responsive LaFonera

If you've tried, like me, to trick a bit with your nice white router and find the LaFonera doesn't seem to respond anymore, here are a few recovery tricks.

  1. Set your computer's network card IP address to 169.254.255.2 and the subnet mask to 255.255.0.0. You may need to disconnect/disable all other network cards on that PC to ensure the proper route is used.
  2. Connect your LaFonera to the network card via a network cable.
  3. In a browser, try to connect to http://169.254.255.1:8080
  4. If that fails, try to establish an SSH connection to 169.254.255.1
  5. If that fails, try to establish a Telnet connection to 169.254.255.1 on the standard port (23), or port 9000.
    • Power on the LaFonera, and after 2 to 4 seconds, try to start the Telnet connection to catch the RedBoot prompt.
    • When Using RedBoot, make sure you are using line mode for Telnet. In Mac OS X and Linux, enable this by creating a file named ".telnetrc" in your home folder. Add the following lines:
192.168.1.254
mode line

If all steps above fails you can try this:

1. Change your:

IP adress to: 192.168.1.166
Subnet mask to: 255.255.255.0
Standard gateway to: 169.254.255.1
DNS: 169.254.255.1 (maybe is an optional setting)

2. Open Putty and enter:

Host name: 192.168.1.254
Protocol: Telnet
Port 9000

3. DON'T press "Open"!

4. Power on your LaFonera

5. When your computer gets an IP adress press the "Open" button in Putty

6. Hopefully you will see someting like this now:

== Executing boot script in 9.160 seconds - enter ^C to abort
^C
RedBoot>

7. If Putty timeout or can't connect to your LaFonera try to restart the LaFonera and try to catch the RedBoot prompt (you only have a few seconds to do that!)

If that fails, you may have to resort to a serial connection



2 comments:

  1. try this for details on serial connection :
    http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/LaFonera_Software_Debricking

    ReplyDelete
  2. After all you could try resetting NVRAM instead of reflashing :

    If the configuration is corrupted/incorrect, try resetting of the NVRAM. Power up the unit, and wait about 2 minutes, then hold down the reset button for several seconds. You must do this while the firmware is loaded, hence waiting for a minute or two after powering it up.

    If that fails, try these steps:

    1. Reset the LaFonera and telnet into the Redboot prompt (see Step 5 above).

    2. Enter the following command to erase the NVRAM partition.

    fis erase -f 0xA83D0000 -l 0x00010000

    3. Load DD-WRT by typing and executing these commands:

    For v24 RC7 and later (which is what I have now):

    fis load -l linux
    exec

    You're all done. DD-WRT should rebuild the NVRAM and it will be fresh as spring!

    ReplyDelete