Belkin RT3200/Linksys E8450 WiFi AX discussion

I encountered the same issue and had to downgrade to version 24.10.4 .

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Hi, guys i mess up and now i have this error on my E8450 after a upgrade.

F0: 102B 0000
F6: 0000 0000
V0: 0000 0001 [0001]
00: 0000 0000
BP: 0400 0041 [0000]
G0: 1190 0000
T0: 0000 02AF [000F]
Jump to BL

NOTICE: BL2: v2.4(release):OpenWrt v2021-05-08-d2c75b21-3 (mt7622-snand-1ddr)
NOTICE: BL2: Built : 02:55:34, Sep 3 2022
NOTICE: SPI-NAND: FM35Q1GA (128MB)
ERROR: BL2: Failed to load image id 3 (-2)

any idea what i can do?

Whoops. It looks like the data layout and/or boot chain is corrupted. If you took a backup of the factory data as was recommended in the UBI installer instructions, then it’s probably not worth trying to figure out what went wrong outside of making it an academic exercise. Take a look at the wiki page for this device. Under the “Troubleshooting” section in the heading of “the bootloader is broken in a weird way”, there is a link to a post in this very forum topic with the “hard recovery instructions” that can recover the device from flash data corruption.

If you don’t have a backup of the factory partition/volume, you have a choice: You can dive down the bumpy, twisted rabbit hole of trying to figure out what happened and hope that the data is still viable enough to be extracted and used, or you can take the faster and easier road and perform the recovery instructions referenced above with the surrogate factory data listed in that same post. Keep in mind that the surrogate factory data file is not a complete image. Although it passed basic testing and function reporting in 23.05.x and early 24.10.*, there is a chance that some WiFi features may not always work as expected.

Thx i found my problem! :slight_smile:

I think it's absolutely essential, and probably not emphasized enough on the installer page. There are many scenarios where fully restoring to OEM and then starting over is a much better option than trying to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes people flash the wrong thing, or they don't have the factory backup, etc.

Now that we have mtk_uartboot, some can be addressed that way, but OEM restore is still a very useful option to have.

Are there any known issue/gotchas using attended sysupgrade on the RT3200 to go from 24.10.2 to 24.10.4? I've tried it several times; LUCI doesn't give any errors and the router reboots and works correctly, but it's still showing as 24.10.2.

what you are experiencing could be the effect of the fitblk tool missing. If you were creating the image for 24.10.2 which you are running now as an upgrade from 23.05.x or earlier using luci-app-attendedsysupgrade, auc or owut, this is to be expected. Verify if thefitblk executable is present or fitblk package is installed. If not

opkg update
opkg install fitblk

fixes it.

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Perfect - that was exactly it, and the router is now working on 24.10.4. Thanks!

Maybe it would be worth adding this as a step 9 in the “Upgrading an UBI installation to new releases after 2024-02” section of the wiki? There's a mention of “fitblk” in the “Overview” section with a clarification request for when it's required, but it seems it would fit better here.

The reason I was asking for clarification is that the wiki once said:

If you do want to use OpenWrt permanently, the easiest is to create an installation image using github.com/dangowrt/linksys-e8450-openwrt-installer and use that once to convert the device to UBI layout.

(see https://github.com/dangowrt/owrt-ubi-installer/issues/9#issue-892510707)

It’s the “permanently” that made it sound like converting to UBI layout was a one-way door—as if there’s no way to go back to OEM.
Can anyone explain what the “permanently” meant?

I wrote that because going back to stock firmware is not trivial, and often requires opening the device and attaching the serial console. This is because the content of the proprietary NAND memory bad block management (NMBM) table cannot be re-created from within OpenWrt's UBI installation. This means that while it is relatively easy to restore the stock bootloader, it often happens that just writing back the Linux-based stock firmware will not result in a working system, because of a (not very small) chance for one or more bad blocks to be located in the area used for the firmware. As the stock bootloader doesn't have any recovery features this means that you have to open the device and attach the serial console in order to restore the stock firmware.

All this essentially means that device warranty is void, because you have opened the device. It also means that in order to restore the stock firmware you may need a not-so-common connector (JST 2.0 6-pin) and a 3.3V TTL level UART adapter at hand, as well as the knowledge and skills to use that. If all you wanted was "give OpenWrt a try" and then return to stock firmware on the same day these are rather big obstacles.

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Built a recent snapshot and flashed it and wifi never came up and couldn’t get an IP with wired DHCP nor manual configuration. Fully reset it, flashed back, and restored backup. Not sure what was incompatible between my previous snapshot and this one, but it had been a while since I upgraded - looks like I built my last snapshot on 20250908.

That's not all that old, so the config is probably fine. I'd suspect the ongoing wifi-scripts vs iwinfo development had something to do with it. If you want to experiment, maybe explicitly add iwinfo to your built-in package list?

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I think you are right. My build from 20251104 is missing iwinfo entirely in the .manifest file, unlike my build from 20250908.

iwinfo is being rewritten in ucode and incorporated as part of the wifi-scripts scripts package instead of being a standalone package, so its disappearing is expected, but... The ucode version is having teething pains, and for some situations simply doesn't work, so the fallback is to just install the old package.

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Thanks for the context.

Rebuilt with iwinfo manually included, but same results - no wireless broadcasting, no dhcp wired IP nor could I connect to it with static IP. I think I’d have to pull it apart and connect serial to know what’s going on, but I don’t have the motivation nor time right now.

Did you try using cable?

Yes, sorry for the lack of punctuation, but with wired, couldn’t get an IP with DHCP nor could I set a static IP and access the router.