TL-WA801ND v5 - Back to stock flashing problems

Installing and Using OpenWrt
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Problems with flashing original firmware after flashing openwrt.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. flash openwrt firmware using tftp recovery process
  2. flash original firmware using tftp recovery process

Desired outcome:
Being able to flash the original firmware

Actual outcome:
Soft brick. Infinite loop of leds that indicate something went wrong.

Firmware used:
In step 1: openwrt-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_tl-wa801nd-v5-squashfs-tftp-recovery.bin
In step 2: TL-WA801NDv5_EU_0.9.1_3.16_up_boot[170905-rel59579].bin

Im a relative novice when it comes to wrt software and setting up networks is sometimes a real challenge for me. So after playing around a bit in openwrt and not being able to do what i initially figured i would be able to, i decided to roll back to the original firmware. As described above, things go wrong after that.

Note:
As this device has only 1 eth port its a challenge to setup luci on it. For me the solution was to download all the ipk packages for the routers architecture and push it to the device via SCP and then install manually.

Anyone else had this problem?
Anyone managed to revert to the original firmware? How?
Anyone else use this device?

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i have same problemm...... any one can help??

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I followed this link successfully. Brief steps:

  • under linux pc, after downloading tplink official firmware, strip bootloader part from the firmware by using linux "dd" command
  • under linux pc, use scp command to copy the stripped firmware created in step 1 into tp-link router (192.168.1.1)
  • ssh to your router and use "mtd" command to flash the stripped version.
    https://www.tech-g.com/2017/04/21/going-back-to-original-firmware-on-tp-link/

I found that when I use TFTP server to flash with the same stripped version, my router is still bricked; so "mtd" command is the way to go.

1 Like
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I would like to confirm that flashing the stripped firmware worked.

dd command: dd if=orig.bin of=stripped.bin skip=257 bs=512
mtd command: mtd -r write stripped.bin firmware

After the device restarted i had trouble connecting it to my pc so i did a hardware reset by holding the reset button for 10-ish seconds.

There is a bit more information on this subject but different hardware here: https://oldwiki.archive.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr1043nd#back_to_original_firmware

Thanks for the help.

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