LEDE-Settings lost after reboot

Hello,

I flashed a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND Router and it work's great! - Until i reboot it. After rebooting all Settings are gone and the login screen appears with the message that there is no root password set.

What can i do? What went wrong?

I hope anybody can help.

Thanks
Marcel

Could have been a bad flash...

What LEDE firmware file did you use?

Could you post a logread output? Did you unplug it or did you do a softreboot.

Maybe your overlayfs relies in RAM because of a storage problem. This can be determined when you post a logread output.

The cause for this is that for one reason or another, the overlay doesn't get mounted, with a tmpfs backed emergency overlay taking its place instead (which is of course lost over a reboot). Why this happens is another question...

  • It could be that your overlay is (too) small (image too big or previous (saved) settings too large), leaving less than 3 erase blocks (at 64 KB each) for jffs2
  • or that the jffs2 formatting had not finished before you tried to configure the router

As a first step I'd suggest to invoke "firstboot" again, which resets the overlay again (deleting all configuration), reboot the router and then wait ~5 minutes before accessing the router again; having a look at logread for jffs2 formatting failures could be interesting as well.

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One more possibility: I distinctly remember this happening to users who would initially flash a sysupgrade instead of a factory image.

sounds wrong. At least for the tl-wr1043 that is an old-style ar71xx/generic router.

For most routers, the only difference between sysupgrade and factory image is just the necessary header & packaging, so that the OEM firmware's flashing routine will accept the Openwrt/LEDE image. For most routers, you can't flash a sysupgrade image using the OEM firmware.

Login to SSH console/terminal and see the output of "df -h". The overlayfs should be mounted as "/".
See exmaple:

tmpfs                    14472        68     14404   0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3         1909456     11536   1799260   1% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        1088       984       104  90% /

Like @slh already explained, if there is not enough free space on the /overlay partition, it may not get mounted, or may get mounted read-only. Then you may have tmpfs mounted for "/", and all settings go just to ramdisk.

3 Likes

I use LEDE Reboot 17.01.4 r3560-79f57e422d.

I don't know what i have done but it works. I logged in with SSH and took a look around the filesystem, reboot and it works.

Thanks @all.

Yes, i renamed the image to tp_recovery.bin and uploaded it over the Webinterface. - that works. Is there another way to flash? A better way?

I have the same issue.
So, when I do

ssh

then

df -h

I see that....

root@OpenWrt:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                    29.6M    492.0K     29.1M   2% /tmp
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

there is not

overlayfs:/overlay

so, When I go to luci web I see that:
Software -

Free space:  **0%**  ( **0.00 B** )

## Status - Memory
Total Available  38592 kB / 60652 kB (63%)
Free 38592 kB / 60652 kB (63%)
Buffered 0 kB / 60652 kB (0%)

What does it mean?
I have Asus RT-N13U B1. I installed:

openwrt-18.06.1-ramips-rt305x-rt-n13u-initramfs-kernel.bin

Welcome to the community @Der_Clown !

This thread is over a year old, you may wish to create a new thread for this.

Try flashing sysupgrade over it.

2 Likes

You're running an initramfs build, which is intended for testing or flashing the sysupgrade version; not usage. Initramfs stores everything in RAM, it does not have a flash based filesystem.

2 Likes

Ok. Which build do I have to flash? I downloaded that from off site on asus' rt-n13u page.

It doesn't look like there is an 18.06.2 build for this model (not sure why), but you could try 18.06.1 from here
http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.1/targets/ramips/rt305x/openwrt-18.06.1-ramips-rt305x-rt-n13u-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
There is no rt305x directory for 18.06.2.

1 Like

Ok, I'll try that.

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