EA7300, Dual Partition Support

For Developers
3

If you read the article about the EA7300 V2 carefully, you will find this important piece of advice:

This device has a dual partition layout (A/B). One partition is set as active and boots. If boot fails three times, than the “other” partition is set as active and booted, assuming it is still safe. A bootcounter (stored in the partiton S_ENV) is used for this purpose. The bootcounter has a flaw that prevents direct install of OpenWrt. Use this procedure to bypass:

  1. Flash Linksys GUI from itself. The device will now boot Linksys GUI from partition B.

  2. Flash OpenWrt with Linksys GUI, it will be installed on partition A and will boot.

You will be able to boot OpenWrt three times from partition A, until the bootcounter flaw set back partition B as bootable (with Linksys GUI). To prevent this, add this code to etc/rc.local

/rom/sbin/mtd unlock s_env
/rom/sbin/mtd erase s_env
exit 0

This code erases the S_ENV partition that contains the bootcounter. Information from this forum thread Can not install OpenWrt on Linksys EA7300 v2 - #11 by thosmos