Ea4500 loop reboot / only failsafe working

Thanks mate, I I am pretty confident that I am running the updated version anyways because of the amount of free space shown in the software menu, the original firmware showed :

100% ( 13.88 MB )

The sysupgrade one :

100% ( 14.88 MB )

Hi guys, now I am trying to revert to the stock firmware since these problems came back again, basically the router will restart itself multiple times in a loop until I do a failsafe reset, when I try to use the sock firmware from the UI I obtain this error :

The uploaded image file does not contain a supported format. Make sure that you choose the generic image format for your platform.

Will this solve my problem ?

sysupgrade -n -F linksysfirmware.img

You need to check the wiki's device page for an answer to that, I don't know the device/ arch in question well enough to answer, but in general.

OpenWrt has introduced image meta data 'recently' (starting with 17.01.x, depending on the target). This meta data is JSON encoded and appended to the actual firmware image, it's technically optional - but sysupgrade will use it and require its presence on the targets supporting this image meta data already (not all do), this is done to achieve better consistency checks before flashing a new firmware and to avoid accidents/ flashing firmware for a different device.

OEM firmwares, respectively the vendor SDKs they're based upon, typically predate the existance of these - so they usually don't provide this image meta data, meaning sysupgrade will reject to flash these images. For OEM images that are sysupgrade compatible, but just lack the image meta data (or for reverting to an older OpenWrt version without it), sysupgrade -n -F linksysfirmware.img is an option. What I cannot answer, is if you can revert to OEM via sysupgrade, or if that needs a different procedure - as that's device specific.

The documentation says I can do it from the web interface which exactly what I tried with no avail.

Method 1 : You could try to flash a Linksys firmware image directly from the LuCI web interface.

The web interface rejects my firmware downloaded from linksys website as well as the one from the device page.

In that case, -F will flash the firmware image you provide it with, ignoring the missing meta data (the wiki entry is just predating the existence of these additional checks), given that the webinterface won't provide you to flash an image without meta data.

(I'm a bit careful in my phrasing here, as I don't know the device/ target in questions and -F will flash the provided image ignoring all sanity checks, no matter what, even if that would brick- or harm the device otherwise).

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I used to have an ea3500, which is basically the same device as the ea4500, and used the -F flag to flash back to stock before I gave it to a relative and it worked fine.

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Thanks, I'll try that option ASAP, winscp ends up with an exit code 127, I wonder if filezilla will solve my problem, what tool did you use for the transfer ?

Unfortunately, it seems that you might be confirming that EA4500 also fails being able to go back to stock like the E4200v2. The caution advice I added on the wiki page then also apply to the EA4500 (which is basically the same as E4200v2).

As suggested by @builder, maybe you could try to flash an old version first and flash the stock firmware from there to see if it works. He has done it as he said in his post, using USB boot. I wonder thought if this was just because that old release didn't process the checks performed on newer releases, easily bypassed now using the -F switch (assumption dismissed, see his post below).

Just to add that nobody confirmed what is causing the flash failure using serial console. My guess is firmware code check at stock bootup.

I just used ubuntu's built in scp, hopefully you'll see @DjiPi's comment before you try, I wasn't aware of that problem.

Thanks guys for your answers, I'll give it a try and revert back to you.
PS : I am pleasingly surprised by how active is the forum, didn't expect that.

Very similar, give a try. Make sure you fetch Linksys Stock Firmware for EA4500. No need to worry about bricking it if you carefully enable USB booting first.

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I tried the -F switch to restore Linksys stock firmware, but it didn't work with the newer sysupgrade. The 17.01.4 version of it worked and didn't need the -F switch.

Nice page you've got there! Lots of good information.

Do you know if it would be possible to just flash LEDE 17.01.4 from OpenWrt, then boot on it, flash stock from there, without the USB boot requirement?

I'm trying to find something that works and that is less scary (and error prone) as a recovery for standard users, and documents it in the Wiki. There would need to be 3 firmware flashes (one to install LEDE, one to install stock, and one to re-install OpenWrt if desired).

Thanks. Yes, it can be done without the USB boot. Your 3 flash approach can get a nice installation: partition 1 with stock, and partition 2 with OpenWRT stable release.

The USB boot is not a requirement. It just makes the device brick-proof. I can boot up my flasher USB stick and de-brick an EA4500 the anytime, LEDE 17.01.4 with multiple versions of squashfs-sysupgrade.bin loaded, including stock. It actually needs only one command to enable USB booting: root@OpenWrt:~# cat << EOF | fw_setenv -s - ...... EOF, after the initial flash of OpenWRT. The long write-up is to safe-guard mistakes.

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Thank you guys for your answers, I've done a sysupgrade with the image being downloaded directly into the /tmp folder, the cisco logo stayed On for a long time but it was my mistake since I SSHd through wifi, anyway I had to reboot the router after approximately 8 minutes (which I guess screwed the process), I am back to OpenWRT right now, I noticed that wifi performance are really bad on the 2.4 band, so I stayed with the 5 ghz which working okay this time, the only hurdle is the free space under the software menu show only 14.88 free :

Free space: 100% ( 14.88 MB )

And I know that per the table of hardware the ea4500 has much more than that, any taughts guys ?

Thanks

What was "the image" you did a sysupgrade? In 18.06.2?

What version of OpenWrt is it running now? What's wrong with the 14.88 MB free space?

Still trying to flash Linksys stock firmware back to your EA4500?

I tried to flash to stock FW_EA4500_2.1.42.183584_prod and yes it was in 18.06, precisely from this version :
OpenWrt 18.06.2 r7676-cddd7b4c77 / LuCI openwrt-18.06 branch (git-19.020.41695-6f6641d)
I am still running 18.06.2, I think that 14.88 is scarce and limited knowing that the ea4500 comes with 128 of flash.
If I can still flash with stock firmware that would be great, 2.4 Ghz performance is very poor.

Will not be able to flash Linksys stock firmware. What worked for me was LEDE 17.01.4. See my post (#23) in this thread.

Flash LEDE 17.01.4 first from the OpenWrt firmware, then from LEDE firmware try to flash your FW_EA4500_2.1.42.183584_prod.

Indeed, it comes with 128MB flash, but its layout is partitioned and also divided for a recovery partition, so the final amount available will not be 128MB.