Netgear WAX630 UI Factory Image not working

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi!

I recently got a Netgear WAX630 AP. I’ve been trying to install OpenWrt into it without success yet. I downloaded the UI-FACTORY image from the firmware selector and following the instructions from this commit I uploaded the tar, waited for a reboot and then attempted to “Boot up Backup Firmware” but that ended up with the exact same UI and stock firmware. Is there something that I’m missing here? I haven’t tried other images because I don’t want to brick it. One thing that I’ve noticed when I compare the tar from OpenWrt with the tar from Netgear is that the nand-ipq807x-apps.md5sum file from Netgear includes the file name while the one from OpenWrt doesn’t. Also, I see in the commit that the version was change to V99.9.9.9 (I assume this is to have always OpenWrt as the greater version, not really sure) and the version file in the tar says “WAX630_V9.9.9.9”. I also didn’t want to modify those in case I screw up.

I would like to avoid opening the case because I’m not that good with soldering and these APs are impossible to get again where I live, so don’t want to risk it if possible.

I would appreciate any help here and any advice to avoid messing something up. Thank you!!

1 Like
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One attempt would be to up/downdate 2x to same version of OEM firmware, so that you can fail boot multiple times and get to other partition….

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Are you sure you shouldn't be following https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=5e33fdfc47eeb3620536baaa1de13fbd2e6b5d62 instead?

4

Hey guys!

One attempt would be to up/downdate 2x to same version of OEM firmware, so that you can fail boot multiple times and get to other partition….

I’m not sure I follow on the proposed solution here, do you mean to try to flash the same OEM firmware on the version that I already have? Would that cause it to fail multiple times to trigger booting the other partition?

Are you sure you shouldn't be following https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=5e33fdfc47eeb3620536baaa1de13fbd2e6b5d62 instead?

Well, the commit for the ui-factory image is newer and supposed to allow using the UI instead of requiring opening the case. As I mentioned I would prefer to avoid doing something that could damage the AP because where I live, they don’t really exist for sale. I got mine while travelling.

In any case, if there is no other choice, can you direct me into a guide for actually doing the steps mentioned there? I don’t really know how to connect to the console on the AP or “Stop auto boot to get to U-boot shell”. Willing to learn whatever I need tho, so any blog/article/video will help.

Thank you for the answers!

5

Since the commit is pretty new, it might not exist in stable, you could try a snapshot image, then downgrade to stable.

Search for "OpenWRT TFTP serial flashing" on YT. The hw part is very similar for all devices, just need to find the header on the PCB.

6

Thank you! I’ll try the snapshot if that doesn’t work I’ll try the flashing with TFTP. Hope that if it comes to the latter, the pinout of the PCB is not hard to find. Will update as soon as I got news (probably some time during this week)