Bricked WA801N v6

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

So the title says it all .... I didn't find my router in the supported devices, BUT I found someone telling that WA801ND v4 was compatible with WA801ND v5, so I stupidly thought that WA801N v6 will be compatible with WA801ND v5 image, but it wasn't. And I bricked my router. (WA801N is not the same as WA801ND)

What I have done exactly:
I used the WA801ND v5 bin and installed it using Tftp, and the result was ALL LEDs are off and router is not pinging, 192.168.1.1 is not working, .....
Then I tried to flash the stock firmware from the official website, (it had _boot in it), and the result was all LEDs blinking.

Then I heard about "stripping" the firmware from boot or smth, so I followed this guide to strip the stock firmware, but I'm not 100% sure I did it right, but I followed the steps with Linux.
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/tl-wa801nd-v5-back-to-stock-flashing-problems/38320/3
The result was the same as before stripping, so idk if it's a problem with the stripping or the flashing itself.

Current situation:
With stripped (hopefully) and unstripped stock firmware, all LEDs blinking.
With the incompatible version of OpenWrt for WA801ND v5, all LEDs are OFF.

What should I do now? I heard about serial flashing, which requires soldering, which I personally don't have any problem with. I can learn it. But is it the solution here?
Is there anything I can attempt with Tftp first? How do I make sure that the stripped firmware I done is correct?

Thanks in advance.

2

since it's not a supported device, it's trial and error.

if you have serial port access, it's probably easy to restore it, if not, you'll have to use tcpdump or wire shark to figure out if it'd accept a fw via TFTP.

3

Bootloader (uboot) size of tl-wa801n v6 is 64k only. And recovery procedure looks like:

set serverip 192.168.0.66
tftp 0x80060000 tp_recovery.bin
erase tplink 0x10000 0x3d0000
cp.b 0x80070000 0x10000 0x3d0000
reset

So try to prepare recovery image this way:

dd if=stock_firmware.bin of=tp_recovery.bin bs=512 skip=1
2 Likes
4

That did the trick ..... Thanks !! My AP is back :heart:

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