WRT32x bricked, stuck on boot with power led blink

Good work!

Great help, thank you all to get it resolved.

I'll go through documentation on openwrt and followup to update to latest.

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always one of the two partition need be on stock firmware. now from stock partition flash openwrt. factory, you don't need sysupgrade.bin.that way you cannot brick the router. now if you want try ddwrt, go back with advanced reboot to stock partition and flash your firmware.flashing from stock is the best way.

I would strongly recommend moving away from this bleeding edge firmware to v21.02.1. Bleeding Endge releases are not stable, and are normally meant for Development Environments.

I hope ur comfortable with coding, your should build your own firmware. A nice way to troubleshoot issues like this without feeling like both hands are behind your back, is build an imagebuilder as well..

If you follow my meaning. You build your image with standard options. Once you are at the point you are ready to make menuconfig. You select your Router. (I always check (M) for Kernel modules, so it compiles the kmods in line with your kernel - eliminates incompatible kmods to the kernel build, but wille at another 20Gb on your HDD) Then ensure you check the option to include the Imagebuilder. And when you have your compiled firmware.

in the ~/buildroot/bin/ under targets, you will have a tarball with the imagebuilder. I usually copy it to your ~/ path. Then tar xvf "imagebuilder-xxx--.tar.gz"

So, in the likely event you still have shit, all you need to do, is go to your

~/buildroot/Imagebuilder, e.g.

And add additional features onto the kernel probably something like this:

make image \
PROFILE="*Linksys WRT32* \
PACKAGES=""uhttpd uhttpd-mod-ubus libiwinfo-lua luci-base \
luci-app-firewall luci-mod-admin-full luci-theme-bootstrap zram-swap \
mwlwifi kmods.. "

Note: if you’re unsure about your profile name ~/buildroot/make info

It will spit out all the Profiles, and yours will be there. The packages it will install, are over and above what is standard to your router. I just gave examples. Then it up to you to chop and change the packages/kmods/custom options till you get it build a nice custom image that will fix any issues you may have.

Couple Sidenotes:

  1. In the menuconfig for kernel modules.. Ensure you check the box with a (M) not a (*). After you save .config and exit. Nano/Vim/Vi .config and look for CONFIG_ALL_KMODS=y - ensure its checked at y
  2. If you are comfortable coding and compiling, gr8! Dont ever us sudo/or try compile as root. It wont work. The propellaheads at OpenWRT try to be clear about this... I'll break it down.. I use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Create a VM with this.
    2.1 To totally avoid any confusion ~/buildroot is your home directory. Create an no sudoer account like dev
    2.2 Login as dev:
sudo apt update 
sudo apt install -y build-essential ccache ecj fastjar \
file g++ gawk gettext git java-propose-classpath libelf-dev libncurses5-dev \
libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev python python2.7-dev python3 unzip wget \
python3-distutils python3-setuptools python3-dev rsync subversion \
swig time xsltproc zlib1g-dev

sudo apt -y install subversion mercurial

sudo apt -y install asciidoc bash binutils bzip2 flex git-core g++ gcc \
util-linux  gawk help2man intltool libelf-dev zlib1g-dev make \
libncurses5-dev libssl-dev patch perl-modules python2-dev python3-dev \
unzip wget gettext xsltproc zlib1g-dev

sudo apt -y install libboost-dev libxml-parser-perl libusb-dev bin86 bcc \
sharutils gcc-multilib openjdk-8-jdk

Once thats done ur good as far as compiling....

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt.git openwrt
cd ~/openwrt
git branch -a
git switch/checkout v21.02.1
./scripts/feeds update -a && ./scripts/feeds install -a
make defconfig
make menuconfig

and the rest us as per your router. I build on TP-Link SoC, so I have to get creative. But your will be clear as day.. Ensure you find the option for Kernel Modules and (M). Include Imagebuilder, and the SDK is also incredibly helpful.

Thats it! Take two Panado, A bottle of Jack Daniels find something to do for the next hour... :0

It had nothing to do with the FW, but with the (mis)application of chosen methodology.

I know that. But Bleeding Edge is not consistent with a working environment that should use a LTS release. Bleeding edge is for development or highly maintained OEM solutions.

Well, that's an opinion (which I disagree with), but has nothing to do with the implication of the post to which I responded.

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To be very clear, 21.02.1 is the current stable release, it's not bleeding edge - far from it.

bleeding edge is the most up to date release GNU/Linux like Ubuntu we refer to them as nighty builds, Kali rolling linux..

But LTS is the Stable release - v21.02.1

anoneome is right, its a personal preference.

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