Installation on Huawei HG556a retains nothing on reboot

I have a Huawei EchoLife HG556a variant A (I'm pretty sure, my serial doesn't match any of the one used to identify the variants) And I have successfully flashed it with the openwrt-18.06.8-brcm63xx-generic-HG556a-A firmware that I downloaded from here: https://openwrt.org/toh/huawei/hg556a

My end goal is to use it as a wireless bridge, and/or a wifi extender.

The flashing process went smoothly, and my EchoLife is now running OpenWRT, I can SSH into it, I can get into the web console. So far so good.

My problem is this: no change I make survives it rebooting, not even setting the root password.
Also, if I ssh into it and save the RSA fingerprint, then reboot it, ssh into it again I immediately get a warning that RSA fingerprint has changed.

Because I've never used openWRT (or indeed any non-stock firmware) I'm not totally sure what's going on, but it looks like the overlay is being stored in a temporary location and is getting lost on power-down.
The df command returns this:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 2560      2560         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    30156       404     29752   1% /tmp
tmpfs                    30156        52     30104   0% /tmp/root
overlayfs:/tmp/root      30156        52     30104   0% /
tmpfs                      512         0       512   0% /dev

And I'm fairly sure /dev/mtd2 or /dev/mtd3 should be mounted, but they are not.

I have looked through other posts on the forum, and this seems like a known issue with routers with 4Mb or less of space, but so far as I can tell the EchoLife has 16

Also, there is a note about not being able to write new data after an upgrade of an EchoLife, but because I have just removed the stock firmware and replaced it with OpenWRT, I don't think this applies (although I might try it if nothing else seems to work)

Thanks in advance for your help!

@Royce2020, welcome to the community!

Try flashing OpenWrt (via sysupgrade and sysupgrade file) a second time; and inform us of your results.

This took me a while to get right because the sysupgrade file listed in the instructions I'm using was wrong (perhaps it was moved?). The file I ended up using was https://archive.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/brcm63xx/generic/openwrt-brcm63xx-generic-HG556a-A-squashfs-cfe.bin

And you where right, I can now write changes to the device that survive rebooting. Unfortunately, the web console has stopped working and although I wasn't using it, that's sort of worrying; Feels like two steps forward and one back.

Next steps are installing the wifi and USB drivers. I'll need to set up the wired network to use my existing modem as a gateway so it has internet access, but how to do that is listed on the instructions I'm using. So wish me luck I guess.

Is there anything you have to do to get the wifi displayed in Luci other than install the drivers?
I've installed the Luci and the drivers, rebooted -but I get nothing.

The USB driver I installed at the same time is working, I can see it being started in the logs, but the kmod-ath9k for the Atheros chip isn't mentioned anywhere.

There is a note in the instructions that if the cal_data is damaged then the wifi won't work, and I'm realy hoping that I haven't broken that. I have a backup, but I think that it would have been taken after the original broke.

Which instructions are we talking about?

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Official firmware here: https://downloads.openwrt.org/

The instructions I'm using are
https://openwrt.org/toh/huawei/hg556a
They list a sysupgrade file here(wich dosen't exist):
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/brcm63xx/openwrt-HW556-squashfs-cfe.bin

Also, apparently there is a bug in versions 19.07.0 to 19.07.3 that cause the kernel to hang, wich is why I'm using a version behind.

I have updated the links in the instructions to point to 18.06.8.