Unbricking my netgear wndr3700 router

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Good evening,
I have a NETGEAR WNDR3700v2 router. I installed OpenWrt on it, it worked fine. Then I wanted to configure it to connect to my wifi and share the network on the LAN ports. This did not work. I ended up not being able to connect to the router in any way.

I've tried this:

  • Serial console (I was unable to connect, picocom did not output a single character)
  • Failsafe mode (Cannot be used in this router because the circuit is physically disconnected when the button is pressed which results in immediate shutdown of the router)
  • nmrpflash (Did not connect)
  • Factory reset button (After factory reset and turning the router back on, nothing happened, I still couldn't connect to it, so I assume the factory settings were not restored)
2

Sounds strange. I have used the OpenWrt failsafe on WNDR3700/3700v2/3800. Or have you done some hardware modification?

But in any case, your best bet is likely the easy-to-use TFTP flash mode.
(It is called as failsafe on the wiki page, but is a separate thing provided by the Netgear u-boot bootloader)

3 
Sounds strange. I have used the OpenWrt failsafe on WNDR3700/3700v2/3800. Or have you done some hardware modification?

Are you sure you did it on VERSION 2 of this router? My router just powers off when the button is pressed.

But in any case, your best bet is likely the easy-to-use TFTP flash mode.

I haven't tried it because I would have to set up a static ip on my computer, and I don't know how to do this. I could probably figure it out from an internet tutorial, but I prefer not if I don't have to, I'll probably mess up my network configuration and spend rest of the day on unbricking my computer instead of the router.

Furthermore, another article on this method said to run ping and ping the address 192.168.1.1, when the router responds, it means it's ready. However, on my computer (if I am not connected to any network) it prints:

ping: connect: Network is not available

So how am I supposed to run ping before the router becomes ready?

4

Yes.
I have owned WNDR3700v1, WNDR3700v2 and also WNDR3800, which all are identical (except RAM and flash size). During the 11 years that I published a community build here for the router family (Build for WNDR3700v1/v2 / WNDR3800 (discontinued)) , I had to use both the OpenWrt failsafe and the Netgear TFTP mode several times with all the routers.

5

I still wonder what you means by this?
You should be able to press the wifi or WPS buttons (in the front panel) quite ok.

(Pressing the physical power switch naturally powers off the device, but all "normal" buttons are just software controlled/monitored gpio buttons.)

But note that the entrance to the OpenWrt failsafe mode requires a button press during a 2-second time window in the middle of the boot process. In practice, the best approach is to press the wifi button rapidly several times after power-on until the power LED starts bliking really rapidly.

6 
Pressing the physical power switch naturally powers off the device, but all "normal" buttons are just software controlled/monitored gpio buttons.

Oh... I see. I did not remember that there are some other buttons since I disassembled it two weeks ago in order to get to the UART pins.

In the end, I used the TFTP method. It turned out that assigning a static IP address to an interface is easy - as is deleting it. Thanks for your help!

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7

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