ZBT WE1226 - Unable to Flash OpenWrt via OEM firmware

Hey guys,

As per the title, I recently purchased a ZBT WE1226 router from Aliexpress, this one in particular: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32843489783.html

It is a MT7628NN based router with a clock speed of 580Mhz, 8MB of flash, 64MB of RAM, 2x2 MIMO 802.11n, 1 WAN port and 2x LAN ports (10/100 Ethernet). It's a basic white disc looking thing with two antennas.

The router is supposed to come preloaded with OpenWrt, but instead has some other firmware which I'm fairly sure is ZBT-OS 19.0809. I have read reports of users being able to flash a new firmware on these routers, but unfortunately the stock firmware appears to be restricting me from uploading any version of OpenWRT, and I am getting an "incorrect model" error message in the GUI when trying to flash a firmware from here: https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/zbt/zbt_we1226

Pic: https://i.imgur.com/CX6313o.jpg

What is interesting is that the product model on the firmware is coming up as ZBT WE2426-C router, as you can see by the homepage: https://i.imgur.com/muFlb7T.jpg

I asked the seller for another firmware and they sent me "mt7628-WE2426-C-20190809_202630.bin", which is a 7.37MB file. This firmware package is much larger than the OpenWRT package, which is perhaps why it is failing to flash.

I discovered SSH on port 2222 and Telnet on 23, but logging in as root with any sort of default password did not seem to work unfortunately.

If anyone has any idea on where to go from here, I'm all ears. I've attached the stock firmware just in case it's useful to anyone: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E32AdJsjJOXTCWvCohAyoyEmPjRldc7m/view?usp=sharing

Thanks in advance.

Try using bootloader, see "Debricking" here as an example.

Thanks, this worked well. Just had to hold down the reset button when powering on the device, keep it held, and then access 192.168.1.1 and it was smooth sailing from there.

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