Question about manually flashing flash partition while running (wrt1900ac-v1)

I have a wrt1900ac-v1 and on the primary flash (the one currently in use) is installed a openwrt firmware image I compiled myself a few years back. Problem is now that I want to upgrade I can not do it through the normal sysupgrade .bin file. It says incomparable file although I am sure it is not. After some digging around it appears that for a while custom images with cryptodev enabled in the kernel can not upgrade normally.

This would normally be only a minor inconvenience. When I got this router I installed a 3.5mm jack connected to the UART serial connector for easy serial console access. Main issue is my USB-TTL serial convetor crapped out so I can not use that currently.

My question is: could I just write either the .bin or the .img firmware file directly to /dev/mtd6 (the alt firmware image space) as shown in the firmware flash layout while the system is running on the primary boot partition?

I really do not want to wait for another serial adaptor so any ideas please help.

btw i am not new here really. I have an account on here, believe the username is thermochromic but it uses my work email from an old job I no longer work at. Not a big deal but any chance I could recover that account without access to the email (and forgot the password lol)? Again not a big deal I was just curious.

What is the exact warning???
Wrt1900ac v1 has seen both a kernel size change and the swconfig/DSA migration in the last few years, so it is quite possible that your new image really is incompatible if the current version is old enough.

What is the exact version / revision of the old firmware?

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