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Topic: Warning: TP-Link TL-WR1043ND brick

The content of this topic has been archived on 6 Apr 2015. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

I've just bricked my router so i m posting here to warn owners of the same model

I was running 10.03.1-rc4, but I have some seg faults with mpd, so I decided to upgrade to trunk via luci

The file in question is:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/ … pgrade.bin

md5 was okay
any help for debricking would be welcomed, I might take it to service center over the weekend

update: with Backfire 10.03.1-rc5, sysupgrade is all good!

(Last edited by kiddyfurby on 23 Jul 2011, 08:57)

I also have this router bricked here. Also did a reflash over LuCI sad

I have connected a serial console and saw that the bootloader was gone sad

Totally bricked.

(Last edited by written_direcon on 10 May 2011, 17:06)

I thought mtd0 and mtd4 are and remain write only. And the sysupgrade would use the mtd names instead of offset numbers, so I wonder what could possibly go wrong.

Edit: here is flashlayout of my WR1043ND:  http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/flash.layout

(Last edited by Orca on 14 May 2011, 10:00)

So what is the suggested way for upgrading openwrt on this device?
I imagine flashing back to stock firmware, then to openwrt would work, but there has to be a better way

What exactly is the sysupgrade image? Why is it so much smaller?

Not really helpful, but for forensic reasons and as the files for Tl-WR1043ND have been removed completely from trunk: build  r26837 worked  (at least in my case).

got myself a new unit from the service center, guess i will stay with rc4 this time...

Has anyone been able to upgrade this router to trunk?

I have 10.03.1-rc4 installed... Since trunk is a long way ahead, and I don't care dealing with some bugs, I'd like to try out trunk, I'm just afraid of bricking it...

Is sysupgrade safe from console? Or is it better to flash the full trunk version over, and redo configurations?

Hi !

I got trunk running fine on two of them.
Had no problems with flashing or anything.

regards,
Ralph

hello,
i'm running with rc5 (snapshot folder),
seems ok to me.
avico

avico wrote:

hello,
i'm running with rc5 (snapshot folder),
seems ok to me.
avico

great news!!

I think, the router was never bricked. How did you know it was bricked? Trunk shapshots do not contain GUI. Maybe this is the reason you think it was bricked,
I install and update trunk versions all the time with no problems.

written_direcon confirmed it. bugs do occur, e.g. once dhcp didn't work. Another time ...

Of course compared to that, wiping the bootloader seems a bit heavy.

Just some feedback... I read the "flash layout" and the sysupgrade wiki page, and felt comfortable to upgrade to the 10.03.1-RC5-testing from the snapshots folder too. I have done it using the sysupgrade command from console, and it has been working fine since yesterday.
Nice web front-end rework, and no bugs found for what I use it.

Since sysupgrade kept my previous /etc/banner, I had to copy the one from /rom/etc/banner.

Also, for opkg to work properly, since it is not a "final" RC5 release, I had to modify the first line of /etc/opkg.conf file to:

src/gz packages http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/backfire/10.03.1-RC5-testing/ar71xx/packages

Cool! Regards,
Mark

(Last edited by markj1 on 8 Jun 2011, 20:33)

It seems that the latest two versions in trunk (June 3, and 1 )  have been broken...(?)

Bricked my router both by web interface flash and serial console flash before eventually reinstalling an earlier version. -  The serial console log ended with a "kernel bug"  and register dumps. (sorry for having failed to copy the contents)

I have installed rc5 testing and it is safe to install. I'm testing now markj1's fix to the opkg problem. [The fix is working]
Now I have problems with auto wifi channel setting.

(Last edited by xcom169 on 5 Jun 2011, 22:15)

I got kernel panic too, but now it's fixed in trunk: https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/9507

But the WIFI is unstable. It drops the connection after a few minutes or sooner if I start downloading a bigger file (e.g running a test on speedtest.net). There is only one suspicious error in the logs:
wlan0: STA 00:02:2d:32:c0:f2 IEEE 802.11: did not acknowledge authentication response
I have TL-WR1043ND version 1.8 and I couldn't find a working version of Openwrt, so I am using the proprietary TP-LINK firmware now. sad

medve540 wrote:

I have TL-WR1043ND version 1.8 and I couldn't find a working version of Openwrt

Really? My WLAN works perfectly using a HTC Desire Z and Intel WiFi 3945 running Linux as associated clients. Maybe I need some more heavy testing to come across the same thing.
OpenWRT versions 10.03.1rc4 and trunk r27157.

(Last edited by gertvdijk on 12 Jun 2011, 17:40)

update: sysupgrade to Backfire 10.03.1-rc5 is good
i have some issue with extroot, but that's another story

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