Seeking advice: installing OpenWrt to the backup partition of Linksys Velop MX10600

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi everyone,

I have a Linksys Velop MX10600 and recently flashed OpenWrt 24.10 rc5 from OEM Web UI using factory firmware image for MX5300. I tried to upgrade to rc6 using Luci but apparently upgrading from Luci does not work. Not sure if that is because MX10600 is different from MX5300, or because sysupgrade in rc5 does not support MX10600 yet.

Now, I have rc5 running and can see mtd information from a ssh shell as shown below:

mtd20: 00020000 00020000 "devinfo"
mtd21: 09600000 00020000 "kernel"
mtd22: 09000000 00020000 "rootfs"
mtd23: 09600000 00020000 "alt_kernel"
mtd24: 09000000 00020000 "alt_rootfs"
mtd25: 00200000 00020000 "sysdiag"

This device has dual partition and can run 2 firmware. I have 'Advanced Reboot' installed and can boot from either partition. Currently I can only boot from the partition that has rc5 installed.

I want to install rc7 to the second partition and boot from there. My question is this: what is the best way to achieve this goal? I no longer have stock firmware on the device, so I cannot flash OpenWrt factory image from OEM Web UI.

I am fairly familiar with Linux CLI but do not want to brick my MX10600.

Thanks in advance for any insight and advice.

2

Found necessary information in the 'Upgrading' section of this page:

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/mx4200_v1_and_v2

[login to the device]

cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/qualcommax/ipq807x/xxx.bin

1. First Check booted partition
fw_printenv -n boot_part

2. Then install Openwrt to the other partition if booted in slot 1:
mtd -r -e alt_kernel -n write openwrt-qualcommax-ipq807x-linksys_mx4200v(X)-squashfs-factory.bin alt_kernel

If in slot 2:
mtd -r -e kernel -n write openwrt-qualcommax-ipq807x-linksys_mx4200v(X)-squashfs-factory.bin kernel

(Note that the file name used above is for Linksys MX4200! and need to be replaced!)

Using this information I was able to flash 24.10 rc7 to the second partition of my MX10600 router, then use 'Advanced reboot' menu from Luci to boot it from the second partition. I then had to go to the failsafe mode and issued the 'firstboot && reboot' command to do a factory reset to be able to use Web UI using the 192.168.1.1 address.

Hope that this will help someone who are looking for similar information.