Unbricking Your Router

I live in a house where I’m the resident tech guru, so its pretty much my responsibility to fix any technical glitch regardless of who actually caused them.

Last Friday, one of my family members got the bright idea to do a firmware update on our router…too bad he used the wrong firmware version for our router!  We have a Linksys WRT310N router, its a sweet little thing that dishes out wireless a, b, g, and draft N, so I was definitely not happy to see that thing bricked.

So here’s a word of warning to all you Linksys owners: the hardware version actually matters when you select the firmware version on the product page!

The Symptoms

1. Power light on the router was steady (non-blinking)
2. The Reset button doesn’t do jack
3. Couldn’t ping 192.168.1.1
4. ipconfig showed that my Default Gateway was 0.0.0.0
5. Setting a static IP using 192.168.1.1 as the default gateway didn’t work

The Solution

The good news was that the router wasn’t totally unrecoverable.  The steady power light on the router seemed to be a determining factor; but if you’ve ever had to Google how to fix a bricked router, you’ll know that its pretty much a dark art filled with mysticism and unconfirmed tales of success.

I did a bit of Googling for similar situations and I eventually found a workable fix for the router.  Here’s a word of warning before we get started: the instructions that I’m about to describe sound completely bogus.  I know because I hardly believed that the fix would even work when I tried it; but I saw enough of the same kinds of “recovery steps”  floating around that I decided to actually try it out, and it worked!

Hardware Setup

1. Grab your router, your power adapter, an ethernet cable and a computer.
2. Plug in the power adapter into your wall socket, but don’t power up your router yet
3. Connect your computer to the router by ethernet (Note: you don’t actually need to connect the router to the internet modem for this to work!)
4. On  your computer, you’ll have to set your static IP to 192.168.1.5 using the default gateway 192.168.1.1. Depending on the version of Windows you have, the steps to do this will vary, so I suggest you Google “how to set a static ip for Windows X” if you’re stuck. Also its doubtful that this step is necessary at all, but most of the people on the forums seemed to follow this step.

Software Setup

1. Go to the linksys website and download the proper firmware version for your router.  Save the firmware onto your desktop and rename it into something that’s easier to type, like working.bin
2. Make sure you have tftp enabled.  To check, go to Start and type cmd.  In the command prompt, type tftp.  If you get a Bad Command message, then you’ll need to activate it.  You can follow the steps here to activate it.  The procedure works for both Windows Vista and 7
3. Now, open a new command prompt window (Start->cmd) and type cd Desktop
4. Type out the following command but don’t type ENTER yet: ping -t 192.168.1.1 (this will tell your computer to keep ping-ing the router)
5. Open a new command prompt window, cd into Desktop and type out the following command, again don’t press ENTER yet: tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT working.bin (this tells your computer to use the tftp program to send the firmware working.bin to your router’s location)

The Fix

1. Find the Reset button on the back of your router
2. Power on your router
3. Press and hold the Reset button
4. On your computer, go to the command prompt window with the ping command and press ENTER
5. You’ll see a bunch of text on your command prompt window.  They should all say something like: Host Unreachable.
6. Remember, keep holding down the Reset Button
7. Now quickly unplug and re-plug in the power chord from your router while keeping an eye on your ping window.  You should notice that for a brief second the text will change from the usual “Host Unreachable” to something like “Packet Sent”.  That means something got through to the router!
8. Now you want to quickly press ENTER in the second command window with the tftp command as soon as you see that the ping messages change from “Host Unreachable” to “Packet Sent”.  This may take a  bit of practice and coordination, but it’ll work.
9. Once you see the file transferred success message in the tftp window, the firmware has been successfully loaded onto the router
10. You’ll need to do a full 30/30/30 hardware reset, the details of which can be found here.  Once the reset is complete your router should be up and running again.

If you’re like me; you’ll be reading these instructions and you’ll be telling yourself “what kinda whackjob fix is this?”  Well, it sounds stupid and the procedure is downright convoluted, but for somehow it works. I’m just glad that I have my router back