Hi !
I have a very positive post for every motorola user, (or everybody with a bricked router using intel flash StrataFlash J3 (those I think: 28F256J3, 28F128J3, 28F640J3, 28F320J3 )).
I have been fighting with my bricked router for last 7 months. My router has died when I was playing with NVRAM settings. I did the short pin trick but I have sent the wrong firmware and it never worked again. After that I was trying to bring it back to life using JTAG method but I only made it whose. I was not even able to erase any part of flash - I thought I burnt the CPU,  I gave up around january, but couple of days ago I found one interesting post from Craven.

So the trick is to add those patches from JTAG WIKI and then everything is going to flash real smoothly ( but maybe not too fast). My only problem was I wasn't really able to use the debrick utility with my linux so I have used knoppix- nice distribution - everything worked nice:)
I will just share some knowledge of things I have observed during bringing back the wr850g back to life.
I got a working CFE and NVRAM from Glenn form the openwrt forum ( once again grate thanks!!!!). I have edited the boot_wait=off in CFE.BIN  to boot_wait=on.
I have erased the NVRAM, KERNEL and I have flashed the NVRAM. then I have flashed the CFE. Voila! - the router has started responding for pings. Of course I had to unplug the JTAG first. Then using TFTP I put the original motorola's firmware. The openwrt firmware did not work - I don't know why. I had to upgrade to motorola's firmware 6.. to be able to flash the router with a bin file
Another thing I have observed:
LED signals:
All leds are on but there is no communication with the router:
  My guess that it has corrupted CFE.
    Proof : I have been trying to upgrade from motorola firmware 4.03 to openwrt rc5 via the webinterface. I had to change the file name to trx but the device went nuts. After a reset all the LEDs were on . I have downloaded the CFE.BIN and compared MD5s with the original CFE.BIN and they were different.
Power LED is red for longer that 5 sec.
  Firmware ( kernel )  is corrupted. - true for every firmware except openwrt!!! With openwrt on motorola the power led is going to be red when device is on.
    Proof: That what the motorola's manual say + only then I was able to communicate with the device and sent using TFTP the right image ( I did the trick with cutting first 8 bytes from 4.03 firmware and it brought back the device to life).

If You have spotted anything else please share You knowledge.

Cheers
Michal

Ps. Also some good literature to read is at http://downloads.openwrt.org/people/mbm/openwrt.html . It may help You understand the differences between the firmware , kernel , CFE ...

(Last edited by yans on 23 Apr 2006, 20:40)