Forensics why router was bricked

Hi all, and first of all thanks for your work on this. Openwrt is just awesome.

Yesterday I compiled Openwrt from source, everything looked fine, flashed it to my router, but ended up with a bricked device, including the bootloader being corrupted (serial console started uboot, but stopped before completion, like initial post here).

My problem is now - I dont see why the router bricked.
Can you give me a hand on how to find out what could have been the reason? I have all the build files, still, and would like to exclude it happening again.

With my current knowledge, I would do everything the same, again.

Router: TL-WR1043NDv2.1
SW: Openwrt 22.03.0 stable
Initial SW: stock fw by manufacturer

The most important info is probably how it was (re)flashed prior to bricking,
what device it was (same as in the link ?), and the size of the image flashed.

Hi Frollic,
yes, it was the exact same model, with exact same result.
Thing is, I have previously flashed multiple devices by the same method without problems (coming from stock, upload via manufacturer gui).

Only difference was, this time I compiled it myself.
I compiled in one package, then flashed factory image as I did before with the others. Maybe the image was too large, yes.
Also, maybe I should have went from stock SW to openwrt, then sysupgraded to self-compiled..
Any more ideas?

Router: TL-WR1043NDv2.1
SW: Openwrt 22.03.0 stable, 17bd6b04777d71d081ddf4ff8fbf44ccaf6f422e, only .config changed
Initial SW: stock fw by manufacturer

I would have done this, but I also would have made sure I had serial console access active, to see if there were any errors reported during flash

you can always buy a flash reader/writer, and resurrect the device.

SPI flash on this quite old sport might die itself. I have WD Cloud v2 That didn't came up after reboot due bootloader failure .Re-flash with file from GPL sources fixed this right away

There's a bug in OpenWrt build system. It could be one of the possible causes.

Quote from wiki:
" There is an issue affecting the current OpenWrt source tree (from at least 21.02 onwards): OpenWrt images built in certain setups will succeed, but they will hang on boot if installed on a device. To work around this issue, please follow the instructions posted here in the section titled “workaround” before checking out the source tree ."

Thank you all, probably the image was too large. umask is ok. Thanks!