I have one of these routers, which I managed to brick while performing a Belkin firmware update some time ago.  I got a USB RS232-TTL cable, hooked it up, and used tftp to load openwrt-rdc-squashfs-ar525w.img (from Kamakazi 8.09.2) to it.  It now boots up, and I can access the device via telnet or httpd, which is a marked improvement over its previous bricked state.  I can set config changes, such as essid (and changed root password), but I don't _see_ the wifi AP at all, and I see nothing to indicate that the essid should be non-broadcast.

The device sports an RDC R3211-G chip.  The board is silk-screened with WRTR-159G_V01 (bits of information offered for others who may be searching on these bits of information).

During boot, I note an abundance of JFFS2 errors relating to expected signatures, along the lines of:

jffs2_scan_eraseblock(): Magic bitmask 0x1985 not found at 0x001c0024: 0x7372 instead

every 20 or so are followed by:

Further such events for this erase block will not be printed

Do I need to perform a jffs2 init of some sort?  The "magic bitmask" errors absolutely flood the dmesg, rendering it useless once the device is booted.

I don't know the significance of them, but the following two files are standouts in /tmp:

-rwx------    1 root     root            0 Aug  7 04:02 .failsafe
-rwx------    1 root     root            5 Aug  7 04:03 .switch2jffs

root@OpenWrt:/# cat /tmp/.switch2jffs
1274

I presume that 1274 might be a pid, though there's no current pid matching that.

I tried the equivalent image from backfire (10.03, then 10.03.1 rc5), but after flashing the router (again, via tftp), the console just sits there after reporting kernel and firmware image sizes.  The device doesn't respond to pings, and after sitting for 10 minutes waiting to see if it might come up (not knowing if say, the kernel isn't outputting messages during initialization), I'm left expecting that the 10.03.1 rc5 is still NFG. -- I got it that there was some issue with 10.03.

flashing with the current trunk snapshot, got me much the same:

# Kernel size = 803072 bytes
# FW size = 2097156 bytes

# fwcheck: base = 0x00400000, size = 0x00000400
# Firmware Checksum O.K
# Kernel copying......BEGIN
# Kernel copying......FINISH

mem_size: 1000000

(then it just SITS there)

I returned to the 8.09.2 image, which after reset shows a banner similar to above, and immediately after the memory size, reports "Uncompressing Linux", and away it goes -- still reporting the jffs2 errors as indicated above.

If I execute 'mount' on the booted router, I get:

rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on /rom type squashfs (ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
mini_fo:/tmp/root on / type mini_fo (rw)

I was surprised to find the following in /etc/fstab (obviously not found and mounted):

# WARNING: this is an auto generated file, please use uci to set static filesystems
/dev/sda1       /home   ext3    noauto,rw,sync  0       0


Sadly, there's not much discussion here about this router -

This poor chap didn't gather ANY replies:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=19582

This thread offers up someone's success with the same revision router (and pointed me to the firmware image to utilize myself), but lacks any confirmation that they got wifi operational:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=19021


So, basically, I have a wifi router, but no wifi presence.  Clearly, the firmware can communicate with the wifi hardware successfully, as via the http Network>wifi menu, I can [scan] and see other wifi networks that are present.  Yes, the device is configured as an AP, not a client or something else.

Yes, I have tried to connect to the device using the essid on the assumption that it might be up but simply not broadcasting.  No luck.

I do not have any other OpenWRT routers - though I do have a USR which I loaded DD-WRT onto.

Note - if I flash the OEM firmware to the device, it comes up, even sees its original configuration data (from before it bricked - must have been undisrupted in NVRAM), and the wifi is functional, so I know the device is good.

Help!