Help recovering bricked Zyxel XGS1250-12

Yapping5 · January 18, 2025, 8:58pm

Hello, long-time OpenWRT user, first time brick mason.

I am using a Zyxel XGS1250-12 and cannot access 192.168.1.1, nor the built-in firmware's 192.168.1.3. The switch is seen by my OS, both Linux and Windows, but DHCP doesn't work. If I manually configure the IP then the OS says "connected" but I am still unable to access the admin panel, nor can I ping the switch.

I was able to log into the switch over a serial connection and have confirmed that OpenWRT is running, but I did notice some odd lines during boot

Net: Net initialization skipped
No Ethernet found

Things I have tried:

Booting into debug mode in OpenWRT. No change
Factory reset. Doesn't seem to revive the factory firmware
TFTP recovery. The switch never reaches out to the TFTP server. This seems congruent with the switch saying no ethernet. Debug mode didn't alter this.

I do have access over serial and can issue commands, but the flash over serial wiki page doesn't seem to work because I have no TFTP access. I also don't see the boot-up TCP burst. It seems to me that the ethernet ports just aren't doing anything.

Normally I try to figure these things out myself and not bug the community, but I am going on two weeks here and every link on google is purple, so I am at the end of my abilities, I fear.

Yapping5 · January 28, 2025, 5:18pm

I fear that this one is bricked permanently unless anyone is able to help

Ramon · January 28, 2025, 6:07pm

trying to get tftp going over serial is your best bet

Yapping5 · January 28, 2025, 6:39pm

Any advice on how to do that? I tried following the unbrick over serial guide but got spooked by the concerns regarding memory addresses.

Ramon · January 28, 2025, 6:56pm

You tried this?

Yapping5 · January 28, 2025, 7:38pm

I missed that somehow. I'll give it a shot and report back

Ramon · January 28, 2025, 7:41pm

changing the uboot command is important, otherwise the network does not come up

Yapping5 · February 2, 2025, 5:21am

Running fw_setenv bootcmd 'rtk network on; boota' over serial, then rebooting, fixed the issue for me and 192.168.1.1 now shows the webui. Thank you, so much @Ramon

Ramon · February 2, 2025, 10:05am

Welcome, can you do a favor in return? Let me know if you can get VLANs working on XGS1250. I tried that a while back on 22.03/23.05 and it would never switch for me, i could only reach the CPU, not have traffic passing through the switch. In the end I reverted back to stock. However it seems there was a significant update for 24.10. So if you can let me know if that works for you then maybe im going to try again.

Yapping5 · February 2, 2025, 11:48pm

I'll try it. I haven't set up a VLAN before though so it might take me a bit.

Ramon · February 3, 2025, 6:49pm

Thank you! VLANs are pretty useful for e.g. a guest network, especially if you have multiple APs. Let me know if you have any trouble.

system · February 13, 2025, 6:50pm

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