OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Weird issue, firmware reverting automatically (wrt1200ac)

The content of this topic has been archived on 13 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Okay I'm hoping that it's just something I'm doing without realizing it, but it seems that my router is often 'forgetting' the OpenWRT firmware and reverting back to the Linksys firmware randomly after a power cycle.

What makes it even more odd, aside from having reflashed it a few times, is that it appears that the settings are still retained (at least until I install OpenWRT again, then I have to redo the settings).

Anyone else experiencing this?

Are you running trunk?  I had something similar happen on my WRT1200AC after reverting to stock and then going back to OpenWrt again.  When you say it's reverting, what do you mean by that?  In my case, the weirdness was that I after I had reverted to the stock firmware, when I flashed OpenWrt back onto it, the device did not reboot, and after 10 minutes or so, I had to manually restart it with the power switch.  It appeared to be running in a hybrid mode (which was probably just browser-side caching) where it would give me a brief, black, Luci screen and then jump to the stock Linksys web interface.  I resolved it by flashing OpenWrt via the Linksys interface again, and then immediately ssh'ing into the device and installing Luci via opkg.

Or is it that after a power cycle, you cannot ssh into the device, and it is in fact the case that the Linksys firmware and all of its settings have been restored?

Did you install Luci after flashing OpenWrt?  The fact that you say your settings are retained may indicate that browser-side caching is giving you the strange phenomenon when you access it via the web interface, but that the only issue is that Luci is not yet installed.  The trunk builds will not come with it.  Not sure about RC3, but I doubt it.

I've not had any issues whatsoever since then (save needing to replace the mwlwifi driver with the latest from @yuhhaurlin & @kaloz.

(Last edited by fecaleagle on 30 Jul 2015, 18:05)

fecaleagle wrote:

Are you running trunk?  I had something similar happen on my WRT1200AC after reverting to stock and then going back to OpenWrt again.  When you say it's reverting, what do you mean by that?

What I mean is that I will start in the Linksys firmware, flash Kaloz's firmware for the router, be able to change settings but then (at random so far), if I power cycle the router, it reverts back to the Linksys firmware.

My best guess for what is happening is that something is causing the router to think that the current firmware is goofing and so uses an alternate image (as I understand it, it has a primary and an alternate copy of the firmware).  The password I chose before works and some of the settings such as wireless network ID's are still there, it's just that the firmware reverted back to Linksys.

I know it's not a browser cache thing, as I am having to use the randomly generated 10.x IP address to access the router before I can use the 192.168.1.1 default address.  When there is a power cycle and it doesn't revert, the IP remains in the 192.168.x range as it should.

I'm hoping I won't need to do a USB/TTL connection again in order to troubleshoot, though I am curious to why it is reverting to the Linksys firmware despite flashing it with OpenWRT each time it reverts.  Best I can tell is that if it's not something triggering it to use a 'backup' version, then maybe the flash is somehow not saving as it should.

Wolfie wrote:

What I mean is that I will start in the Linksys firmware, flash Kaloz's firmware for the router, be able to change settings but then (at random so far), if I power cycle the router, it reverts back to the Linksys firmware.

So you're flashing firmware out of  https://downloads.openwrt.org/people/kaloz/?

His last build was from April (not sure that this has anything to do with your issue, whatsoever), so I'd be tempted to start flashing the Chaos Calmer RC3 from earlier this month (or Trunk) instead.

I wish that somebody more knowledgeable would help.  This is a fantastic router on OpenWrt, but you've had a pretty miserable experience out of the gate, huh?

Yup getting the same, and it's annoying. Flashed to OpenWRT as the Linksys firmware would only give about 10MB/s on ac, getting 41 MB/s on OpenWRT ac. But if I reboot the router sometimes it will revert to the old Linksys firmware and I can only then login via the linksys wifi website. This is using Chaos Calmer r45573.

I thought I had updated this topic to mention that I wasn't experiencing the issue anymore but I guess I didn't.

What file are you flashing with?  Also do you have a way to connect using USB/TTL?  You might try flashing both the primary and alternate memories to see if that clears the issue up.

Flashing this openwrt_wrt1200ac_snapshot which is OpenWrt | OpenWrt Chaos Calmer r45573. How do you flash both memories?

I just recently switched to OpenWRT, and I'm suffering from this on a WRT1900AC v1.

*EDIT*

So it seems that every 3 reboots of the device, it goes back to the Linksys firmware. I'm not sure what the cause is yet, but that's what it seems to be. Also having issues with 5GHz signal, which is what is causing me to reboot the router physically.

(Last edited by NevynPA on 29 Jan 2016, 01:09)

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