Support for Asus ZenWiFi BT8 Tri-band Wifi7 (Mediatek MT7988)

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
225

It sounds like it might be something wrong with your factory

This is what I experienced earlier with my recovered BT8 too - I used a generic factory before I found an old backup of my original factory

Romanovj was very helpful with these commands in uboot:

ubi remove rootfs_data

ubi create factory 0x155000 static
tftpboot $loadaddr factory.backup
ubi write $loadaddr factory 0x155000

ubi create rootfs_data - dynamic

But you should only change your current factory to your backup factory

226

I guess you may be right, in a screenshot of yours the wifi interface shows an asus mac address (cc:28:aa...) in my case it is a mediatek one (00:0C:43....). The factory partition itself exists and has the right size, but perhaps there also was an error writing it just as with the bootloader. The only backup I have is the whole ubi partition from after the TRX installer ran, while I could try that I donĀ“t know how to extract just the factory partition from that and I guess that could also be too late of a backup.

@daniel Is the owrt-ubi-installer still a work in progress, or did I just have bad luck?

227

I was able to extract my old factory from an UBI file, but as I remember it was complicated.

I think I used "Ubi reader" which involved installing a lot of python packages and a python app installer before I could actually run it.

And then there was a lot of different commands to try before I found the correct one.

I thought that mine was "too late" to extract too, but it actually was my old original one :slight_smile:

228

Thank you for the tip, unfortunately it seems the factory volume was already empty:

Volume: factory
		---------------------
			Vol ID: 1
			Name: factory
			Block Count: 0

The boot_backup volume contains only mtd0 and mtd1, but from your paste of the original firmware the factory partition was mtd3. The fip volume also shows a block count of 0, so no wonder why it didnĀ“t boot at first.

229

I had introduced a bug into the first release of the installer because the MTD partition names expected by the installer were not in sync with what went into OpenWrt in the end. I've fixed that with a later release of the installer a couple of days ago:

Update: I read now you actually used that one and yet ended up with an empty factory volume. So probably there is another bug there, I will try to find time now in the weekend to revert my device to stock and retry the installer.

2 Likes
230

Apologies everyone, I found the bug, fixed it and present to you a fully tested fixed installer release:

If anyone needs help recovering their devices damaged by any of the first two versions of the installer, please contact me by PM, I will of course help you.

7 Likes