OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Working on Netgear WNDR3700v5

The content of this topic has been archived between 31 Mar 2018 and 7 May 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

@Francis, what did you do to make the firmware check pass?

Thanks!

Ordered WNDR3700 online hoping I would get WNDR3700v5, but received a WNDR3700-NAS100.

Does anybody in US want to trade their WNDR3700v5 for my used WNDR3700v4?

Never mind smile
The box says WNDR3700-NAS100, but the router itself is WNDR3700v5, so I'm all set.

shining_wind_3007 wrote:

@Francis, what did you do to make the firmware check pass?

Thanks!

I wrote my own tool to do it. I will put the code on github today, if I have the time.

EDIT: I put the code on github, you can find it here.

Francis.

(Last edited by Francis on 10 Aug 2015, 13:21)

You can still get a WNDR3700v4 if you look hard enough. I picked one up brand new (probably been in a warehouse for a year or more lol) on eBay about 2 weeks ago. Made 100% sure with the supplier it was a v4 not a v5 before shipping after checking DD-WRT/OpenWRT compatibility lists.... so it can be done smile

Great detective work Francis, thank you for sharing!

No problem, I'm here to learn and share smile

Francis.

so.. i bought the wndr3700 believing there would be support for openwrt already without checking the site wiki directly..
i used a meta-shop-aggregating site were you could filter for specific features.. openwrt was one of them.

so here i am with a router which stockfirmware doesnt have the features i wanted (which i was kinda expecting..)
and cant run openwrt on it.

i decided on not returning it and instead figuring this shit out, eventhough i am a total noob, at least with a programming background, but when i look at all that stuff which already has been achived thanks to francis.....
still, there has to be something i can do.

any tips? guides?

I too just bought the WNDR3700 thinking it was fully supported. I got a v5.

If there are working flashable images, I'd like to try... I'm also familiar with git and would like to contribute where I can. I've never done any embedded device software before though. Any links to guides to get started would be great.

I've done a git-clone of the trunk repos (openwrt and packages).

Thanks and regards,
Philip

Hello!
I've just received a WNDR3700v5, which i'll probably work on it soon. First i'd like to thank Francis for sharing his work. I need to know if anyone has made some progress after Francis and willing to give a brief of his progress. Thanks

(Last edited by pror21 on 9 Jan 2016, 19:01)

I just bought it specifically to install openwrt on it but as most of you I received a v5. This is quite disappointing.

Good luck in your endeavour pror21.

pror21 wrote:

Hello!
I've just received a WNDR3700v5, which i'll probably work on it soon. First i'd like to thank Francis for sharing his work. I need to know if anyone has made some progress after Francis and willing to give a brief of his progress. Thanks

I tried to open it and connect to serial cable. I could obtain boot log but wasn't able to reinject original firmware with TFTP, so was scared to proceed. Router can be debricked with that windows xp program that Francis mentioned but I only have access to GNU/Linux machines.

I wish you good progress on this router.

Be good to have this router added to the list!
Keep up the good work guys!

Look forward to you guys cracking this one.

andrius wrote:
pror21 wrote:

Hello!
I've just received a WNDR3700v5, which i'll probably work on it soon. First i'd like to thank Francis for sharing his work. I need to know if anyone has made some progress after Francis and willing to give a brief of his progress. Thanks

I tried to open it and connect to serial cable. I could obtain boot log but wasn't able to reinject original firmware with TFTP, so was scared to proceed. Router can be debricked with that windows xp program that Francis mentioned but I only have access to GNU/Linux machines.

I wish you good progress on this router.

Hey andrius,

you can't create a virtual machine with Windows XP in it?
Maybe it can work with others Windows versions, but when I was working on this router, I used Windows XP.

andrius wrote:

I tried to open it and connect to serial cable. I could obtain boot log but wasn't able to reinject original firmware with TFTP, so was scared to proceed. Router can be debricked with that windows xp program that Francis mentioned but I only have access to GNU/Linux machines.

I wish you good progress on this router.

It's even better! You can try upslug2.

//edit//
Sercomm Updater works fine under XP at VirtualBox

(Last edited by mikedee on 29 Jan 2016, 15:58)

mikedee wrote:

It's even better! You can try upslug2.

//edit//
Sercomm Updater works fine under XP at VirtualBox

I've tried XP on VirtualBox. But Sercomm Updater crashes at 99% leaving my router bricked. Any idea how I can fix this?

upslug2 also doesn't work. Probably needs some patching for this device.

(Last edited by andrius on 31 Jan 2016, 22:34)

andrius wrote:
mikedee wrote:

It's even better! You can try upslug2.

//edit//
Sercomm Updater works fine under XP at VirtualBox

I've tried XP on VirtualBox. But Sercomm Updater crashes at 99% leaving my router bricked. Any idea how I can fix this?

upslug2 also doesn't work. Probably needs some patching for this device.

No, I've used Updater on VB without any problems...

Ok, I've managed to debrick my router with tftp.

I connected to 192.168.1.1 with tftp
Then I had to switch to switch to "mode binary" else transfer failed.
Finally I ran "put WNDR3700v5_V1.1.0.32_1.0.1.img" and router was debricked

If you would like this piece of junk it is now on eBay for £34.97, sold by Curry PC World as v4, but I received a v5. And I am sending it back straight away!

The price is proof that only routers supported by OpenWRT or DD-WRT sell.

I've just recieved a v5 myself, have been toying around with it a bit and discovered that you can get telnet access pretty easy.

I've used https://github.com/insanid/netgear-telenetenable, to send a magic packet to the device. Afterwards, I could just telnet to 192.168.1.1, and got a root shell.

A few posts back there was a message about kernel not finding rootdisk, the official build uses the following device as a rootdisk:

# cat /proc/cmdline
console=ttyS1,57600n8 root=/dev/mtdblock3 console=ttyS0

Hopefully we can get dd-wrt running on this soon, I've seen horrible webui on routers before, but this netgear one is pretty bad....

Small update, I too have added the v5 to the openwrt device tree, and successfully compiled an image.

I've used the Sercomm updater in a qemu-kvm Windows XP virtual machine, for the original firmware I needed to reboot the device after the updater crashed at 99%, uboot then listens for tftp after a power reset.

Flashing openwrt with the Sercomm tool works fine, still crashes but no tftp is required afterwards. I used Francis's tool on Linux to make the Sercomm tool recognise the bin file.

I created a custom dts file so I could pass the rootdevice id, which seemed to work. After that my serial console dissapeared after some boot time, but I managed to solve that by appending 'keep_bootcon=1' to bootargs in the dts file.

The bootargs part of my dts file now looks like this:

bootargs = "console=ttyS1,57600n8 root=/dev/mtdblock3 keep_bootcon=1";

Next up I was greeted by a kernel stacktrace sad. I've put the complete log here: http://pastebin.com/XymMecxs

Looking through the logs, it seems that the kernel at least mounts rootfs now, so that's some progress.

I'm currently flashing back stock firmware, because I forgot to write down some useful information, I've committed my progress to a Github repository, which you can find here: https://github.com/maikelwever/openwrt-15.05-wndr3700v5

Any help, suggestions, pull-requests, etcetera, are very welcome. I've never done this kind of thing before, except run dd-wrt on a previous router...


Edit: It seems the device boots, but I can't ssh/telnet into it. The kernel boot logs also stop without showing a sign of the boot being completed. That said, it seems init is started, so the rootfs definitly works. The complete log can be found here: http://pastebin.com/iBs4gsBT

(Last edited by maikoool on 23 Mar 2016, 19:23)

Uboot and OpenWrt Alpha Test images are available :

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= … DBpNkVsRlk

There are still bugs....most notably the RADIOS DO NOT WORK (yet)

IF YOU USE THESE FILES

You do so at your own Peril! … No Warranty!

NO CRYING....it's just a router smile

Using ldpinney's uboot and openwrt patches, and some little tweaking of my own, I was able to get this up and running. The leds still don't work, but 5ghz wireless seems to work (tested with wpa2-psk enabled), I was able to hit 100/100 mbit up/down simultaneously (transmitting zero's with netcat). A conventional speedtest yielded 120/12, which is the bandwith limit of my line. 2,4ghz wireless does not seem to work, and I haven't tested the usb port. LuCI works well too.

You can find my modified source here (includes the patches from ldpinney): https://github.com/maikelwever/openwrt-trunk-wndr3700v5