Openwrt One stuck in boot loop

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I recently acquired an Openwrt One and it worked reliably for a while but from one day to the other without me doing anything the router did not boot up again. It was repeatedly trying tough. From the LED side of things it was always a loop of every led being lit than only the white boot one and than nothing until the cycle repeated.

I looked into it with via the USB-C Debug Console in the front and some AI help to decipher the output. The boot logs seemed fine but it always returned to the boot selection menu. It was also no help to switch to NOR or NAND.

AI was concluding that the hardware is at fault. It was suspecting a sticky reset button but with the console I could rule that out. Interestingly enough I also happened to check the GPIO and the input labeled reset was active. I could not get it to either ignore this input or to reset it to inactive.

I have by now tried everything I could think of and nothing worked so I am reaching out in the hopes anyone can help me. My money currently is on a hardware fault which would be very unideal.

2

Sorry, but we don't know if your "everything" is the same as our everything.

3

If you still have serial access then "just" flash a plain vanilla OpenWrt and continue from there?

4

Fist of all thanks for your help.

I followed the steps 1:1 like the docs told me under the "Flashing image" section. But I did not get to the LED getting green. I ended up with a red LED and the message:

on
starting USB...
Bus xhci@11200000: xhci-mtk xhci@11200000: hcd: 0x0000000011200000, ippc: 0x0000000011203e00
xhci-mtk xhci@11200000: ports disabled mask: u3p-0x1, u2p-0x0
xhci-mtk xhci@11200000: u2p:1, u3p:1
Register 200010f NbrPorts 2
Starting the controller
USB XHCI 1.10
scanning bus xhci@11200000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
       scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found
** Bad device specification usb 0 **
Couldn't find partition usb 0:1
Can't set block device

I got into the console and used "usb reset" and "usb start" but with no change to the "0 Storage Devices" part.

Inspecting the drive itself I can not make anything out that is suspicious:

[notroot@SnowWhite:~]$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 14.65 GiB, 15728640000 bytes, 30720000 sectors
Disk model:
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1f09ec41

Device     Boot Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1        2048 30719999 30717952 14.6G 83 Linux

[notroot@SnowWhite:~]$ lsblk -f /dev/sdc
NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL   UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sdc
└─sdc1 vfat   FAT32 OPENWRT 2852-D68F                              14.6G     0% /run/media/notroot/OPENWRT

[notroot@SnowWhite:~]$ ls /run/media/notroot/OPENWRT
openwrt-mediatek-filogic-openwrt_one-factory.ubi  openwrt-mediatek-filogic-openwrt_one-snand-preloader.bin

But maybe u guys have a better eye for this and can spot anything or if you want me to try something or need more info be sure to message me. ^^

5

Did you have seen and read https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one ?

6

(post deleted by author)

7

See the wiki: https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one#upgrading_the_firmware_from_usb

Specifically this Note:
Note: You may have to try other USB drives formatted to FAT32. There are observations that some USB drives have incompatibility issues. Try using a MBR partition table. If you get a Bad device specification usb 0 error from u-boot, increasing the delay may help:

U-Boot Shell
OpenWrt One> setenv usb_pgood_delay 4000 
OpenWrt One> usb reset resetting USB... scanning usb for storage devices... 1 Storage Device(s) found