I am currently upgrading my WiFi network and obtained two cheap WAX218 Access Points for that. Of course, they both should run OpenWRT.
So I first upgraded one of the two to the newest stock firmware WAX218_firmware_V2.1.1.3, did some speedtests, and then migrated it to OpenWRT as described here under "Web UI method", so basically:
- upload the openwrt-24.10.0-qualcommax-ipq807x-netgear_wax218-web-ui-factory.fit image
- wait for device to reboot
- in the recovery initramfs LuCI flash the most current openwrt-24.10.0-qualcommax-ipq807x-netgear_wax218-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
This all worked perfectly fine on the first access point. However, when I decided to upgrade the second access point, things did not go so well. I am not sure if this is related to the fact that I did not first update to the newest firmware version from Netgear, but the situation now is as follows:
The system did take the web-ui-factory.fit image, rebooted, and now greets me with the recovery initramfs LuCI. But no matter what I tried, it does not want to flash the sysupgrade.bin file. I tried some things like setting fw_active to 0 (which just stopped the device from comming up at all, forcing me to set fw_active to 1 in the bootloader again) and different sysupgrade.bin files including the original firmware image, but the system always reboots to the initfs. So my assumption is that I should have done a factory image upgrade first and then the actual OpenWRT installation. But I cannot change that now.
What I can do, however, is use the working access point as a reference. I did a dump of all the mtd partitions and compared the md5sums, these partitions are different on the bricked one:
mtd1 0:mibib
mtd7 0:appsblenv
mtd8 env-data
mtd9 0:appsbl
mtd12 0:art
mtd13 rootfs
mtd15 rootfs_1
mtd16 wififw_1
I would assume that if I flash the right partitions on the bricked device, I should get everything working, but I also am aware that some of these partitions contain device-specific settings that I should not overwrite. In a first approach I tried to access these partitions with jefferson, but it only extracted empty folders.
Which of these partitions can I overwrite to fix the device?