Hello,
I am having difficulties installing OpenWRT on Netgear R6350. So far I have tried to install both Snapshot and version 19.07.2 through web gui and also both through telnet. Every time the router ends up bootlooping, flashing first all 4 leds, then first led (power), second led (internet), and last first led again, then it just repeats.
Through web gui installation, when trying to install openwrt, it starts bootlooping before the installation is finished, I guess about the same time when upgrading stock firmware would reboot once. I am able to restore the router with nmrpflash. I am also able to upgrade stock firmware from older stock firmware. Any ideas what is causing this bootlooping?
Downgrading and upgrading with stock firmware from stock firmware is working. I am baffled why does OpenWRT not work, I am new to all of this. Please tell me what kind of information I can provide which would help me get openwrt up and running. I pretty much only bought this device to run OpenWRT on.
I notices the flash layout is a little different than what https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/netgear_r6350 shows
my device's mtd layout:
Your router seems to have a bad flash block in the kernel partition. This is compensated by the manufacturer by enlarging partitions that have bad flash blocks. However, OpenWrt does not yet use the partition table that is stored in the flash (it uses fixed partition offsets instead).
I have sent a patch for making use of the partition table to the mailing list, but it still needs testing. Could you compile your own image using that patch to check whether it helps?
That patch should fix the partition table in OpenWrt. I am not sure though if this patch is enough to make your router work, as the bad block is already in the kernel partition. The patch is only going to help if the issue is the kernel not finding the root file system, it won't help if the kernel itself does not load successfully.
I have sent you an email but just realised you are also on here on the forums.
Your patch is working with a couple of beeline devices as well as mine (Sercomm S3) which I can confirm was tested with devices with bad blocks that did not boot without the patch.
Adrian (openwrt reviewer) asked if the patch can be sent upstream. You can find the discussion here
As you may know from the mailing list archives, the suggestion to upstream this patch isn't new. And I agree it would be good to get the partition parser merged.
However, I am currently not working on that, and I have no plans to do so at the moment.
If you want to get this upstreamed in the near future, you should work on that yourselves. Another user also mentioned interest in working on it here, so you could also contact them for help.
Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but this is the situation I'm facing at the moment. I have one of the blessed R6350 units with what appears to be the bad block in the kernel partition. I have been a long time user of dd-wrt user for many of my routers since 2008 but this router has been testing me and I've had nothing but trouble lately with dd-wrt and would like to try something different. I would stick with the Netgear default firmware, but I'm after wireguard for the VPN and frankly the configuration in the Netgear is limited.
I attempted to build using the patch given here by @janh, but my building knowledge is not great and likely many changes have occurred since Sept 2021 as the patch does not directly apply. I attempted to add the entries in manually (those that were edited files), have the remaining patch generate the files, build from there, but router still refuses to play nice.
Thanks,
Pete
p.s. I attempted to locate the version the patch applied to before and build from that, but it refused to build due to python being too new
An updated version of that patch is already included in the main and 23.05 branches. So, the partition table should be used if you just build from on of those branches without further patching (or if you use a pre-built snapshot image).
Ah, ok - I tried the prebuilt 22.03.5 for the unit which resulted in the bootloop. Then continued using the imagebuilder for the same build. I will give the current snapshot build (June 2) a go right now
Awesome, thanks for responding so quickly - after getting LuCI in with putty, it was straight into the GUI. 5Ghz wireless isn't coming up at the moment, but that's something to look at when my eyes are rested. Flashing was so much nicer this way (if I wanted to try a new build of dd-wrt, I would have to reflash the stock Netgear FW using nmrpflash and then flash the dd-wrt factory upgrade as the web upgrade in dd-wrt would brick the router each time (I suspect due to this "bad block" as another dd-wrt user didn't have any issue with the web upgrade). Now the question is, if upgrade once stable released, would the upgrade within the GUI work? Or in other words would the upgrade also respect the current partition layout or just wipe it and possibly cause a return to boot loop? - I'll have to find out down the line.
Again, thanks again for answering on something from 3 years ago
I believe it's due to bad blocks. There is a patch for it but the DTS for the Netgear devices will need to be updated. I never owned any of the devices but someone with the devices and some skill should be able to update them and send a patch for openwrt which should fix the issue of reboots.
If anyone is up for it have a look at this pull request and the dts file
