I am unable to successfully flash OpenWrt on my newly purchased Linksys EA8100 v2. (I thought I had ordered the v1, but as of this writing, snapshots are available for this device: https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/ea8100_v2 so I decided to roll with it.)
Router resets, then boots back into the OEM firmware, with a message along the lines of "successfully flashed firmware"
I have tried repeating this process a dozen times, hoping to overwrite anything in a second partition to no avail. I have tried the "power three times" cycle, where I turn the router off with the switch, turn it on under the blinking "linksys" logo disappears for two seconds, then repeat. I have also tried powering down the router and my cable modem, plugging an ethernet cable into the WAN port in the modem, and then simultaneously powering both on at the same time, since I have seen other users run into issues with DHCP addresses being issued that force the router to boot into one or the other partition.
Any help or advice is appreciated! I'm about to return this hunk of junk if I can't get OpenWrt installed.
I installed the OEM firmware located on Linsys' Official Support site:
After rebooting, installing OpenWrt, then another reboot I was off to the races with a working OpenWrt install. I'm guessing this is part of the A/B setup they have on some of their devices for saving a "backup" firmware in case an upgrade doesn't work. Until next time, thanks for reading!
I have tried for several hours to get OpenWrt installed on the EA8100 v2 today, including installing the OEM firmware and trying to install the current 22.03.5 release and the snapshot linked from the device page. No joy at all; every time, it reboots (very slowly) into the original Linksys firmware. I'm not in any rush to use this device -- I bought it cheap second-hand in the knowledge that it wasn't fully supported by OpenWrt -- but if anyone has any experience or suggestions for a step-by-step to get this working, I'd be glad to have it. One thing I haven't done is connect it to the Internet; I don't want to put it on my network where it will conflict with other devices in 192.168.x.x, so I've been trying to do all this offline.
No; I gave up for the moment. I think I'll try the 2023 rc2 soon, but I don't see why that would actually make a difference when it comes to installing. Any other ideas, anyone?
Try installing the OEM firmware, reboot, install OpenWrt, and reboot again. If that fails, maybe try installing OEM, reboot, install OEM, reboot, install OpenWrt, reboot and see what happens. From what I remember reading, it has something to do with the A/B partition setup on the device. I think you need to get the installation to land on the A side (or maybe it's the B side) before you can get it to boot into it. That's what, I believe, installing the OEM stuff is supposed to buy you - it should alternate sides and get you to boot temporarily onto the other one. Take all this with a grain of salt. I barely know what I'm doing but I did get it to work for me on a v2.
Edit: I should add that there is no longer any need to use snapshot images. A stable release is available from the device's page:
It worked, I updated to 2.0.4 OEM firmware before installing 22.03.5 Stable OpenWrt.
At first, I tried to install OpenWrt on 2.0.1 OEM firmware without updating latest 2.0.4 OEM firmware
I finally managed to make it work, by installing an OLD version of the firmware first. It came with 2.04, and by reverse-engineering the URL on the Linksys download site I was able to figure out the URL for the 2.03 version. When I installed that, I was then able to install OpenWrt 22.03.5. My guess is that simply installing the same 2.04 version had no effect because it didn't use the second partition. Now to find out what it can do for me...