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Topic: :? Need help! Bricked my TpLink WDR4900 by reverting to stock firmware

The content of this topic has been archived on 26 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hello, I strongly need your help for my bricked WDR4900, hardware version 1.3
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr4900

At first I followed the instruction in the above link and flashed Openwrt into router. It worked fine at first, but later it came to me that the router with Openwrt is not stable enough, so I followed the instructions there ("Reverting to stock firmware") step by step again and tried to reflash the firmware memtioned there (wdr4900nv1_en_3_14_1_up(130304)_beta).

Now after reflash and restart, I get this:
1. the globe LED symble of router blinks at first and turn stable
2. a WIFI LED symbol appears

then nothing more ....

I tried to wire to the router via 192.168.1.1, all connections through putty, telnet are failed. Also pressing and holding the reset button at backside brings nothing. ...

Now I really don't know what I can do.  sad


Please please help me further, really thanks

default ip 192.168.0.1 ?

do you see the wifi network?

No, there is just a WIFI lamp, but no WIFI signal ... sad

Did you try reset button at boot? You can download Wireshark or similar on your computer, set it to listen on your Ethernet interface, then hold reset and power the router, holding reset the entire time. You should see some requests from 192.168.0.86 to 192.168.0.66 for TFTP. If you do, you should be able to save it without serial by using that procedure.

tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin (MD5: 55C925DF26E9408AA6357C39D89B45D6) is the 130424 firmware for WDR4900 v1 with the bootloader cut out, I used that image myself to recover my WDR4900 v1.3 using the TFTP method linked to earlier. If you would rather download the image directly from TP-Link and cut it yourself, use this command:

dd if=original.bin of=noboot.bin skip=769 bs=512

Filesize of noboot.bin should be exactly 16 252 928 bytes after doing this. I used TFTPD32 (32-bit version, 64-bit didn't work) to do the recovery.

makro wrote:

Did you try reset button at boot? You can download Wireshark or similar on your computer, set it to listen on your Ethernet interface, then hold reset and power the router, holding reset the entire time. You should see some requests from 192.168.0.86 to 192.168.0.66 for TFTP. If you do, you should be able to save it without serial by using that procedure.

tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin (MD5: 55C925DF26E9408AA6357C39D89B45D6) is the 130424 firmware for WDR4900 v1 with the bootloader cut out, I used that image myself to recover my WDR4900 v1.3 using the TFTP method linked to earlier. If you would rather download the image directly from TP-Link and cut it yourself, use this command:

dd if=original.bin of=noboot.bin skip=769 bs=512

Filesize of noboot.bin should be exactly 16 252 928 bytes after doing this. I used TFTPD32 (32-bit version, 64-bit didn't work) to do the recovery.


Really thanks makro for your help

Yes, I tried the reset method described in page, but it didn't help, no reaction from router.

I am really an layman regarding to programming router and linux, but I'll try to follow you steps.
But some question beforehand:

1. You meant "firmware for WDR4900 v1", is this firmware compatible for the WDR4900 hardware version v1.3, or the v1 has another meaning other than hardware version.
2. If understand you correctly, what I should do is:
    - download the "tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin" provided by you
    - install the TFTPD32
    - hard wire the router with computer (?What is there is no reaction from router)
    - then flash (?Use telnet/putty? but no reaction from router until yet)

Maybe some more info could help me over other pitfalls unknown to me


Really thanks and sorry for my tedious questions ...

TP-Link doesn't differentiate between v1 and v1.3 on their website, and there doesn't seem to be any practical differences between v1 and v1.3 documented anywhere. I can't be sure, but I think the procedure should work equally well for all v1 devices. I didn't notice until now you also have a v1.3, same as mine.

A very detailed description, it assumes you use Windows:

- Download tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin as I linked to
- Download Tftpd32 zip file, the latest version is 4.50, and the file you should download is named tftpd32.450.zip
- Unzip the Tftpd32 zip file you just downloaded to somewhere
- Put the firmware image you downloaded at first in the same folder as tftpd32.exe, and rename it to "wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin"
- Set the IP address of the Ethernet interface you will use to 192.168.0.66, subnet mask 255.255.255.0. Guide for setting static IP address if you need it. You can leave the default gateway and DNS servers blank (ignore the warnings, you won't have internet access while you do this anyway), as long as you set the IP addresses to said values.
- Connect your router to your computer, but don't power it up yet.
- Run tftpd32.exe from wherever you have put it.
- Press "Show Dir" button, you should see the wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin file listed there. If you don't see it, you can press Browse to change to the directory where you have put it, or copy it to the Tftpd32 folder. Do what it takes to get wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin in the "Show Dir" list.
- Choose 192.168.0.66 from the Server interfaces dropdown menu in Tftpd32.
- Hold the reset button on your router, then power it up. Do not release the reset button at any point.
- Tftpd32 should report a transfer, it will show a progress bar. It is fairly quick, when the progress bar disappears the transfer is finished. Just to be safe, keep holding the reset button about 3 seconds after the progress bar on your computer disappears, then let go of the reset button. The router should still be powered on.

The router will now flash the firmware image and reboot. In my case it didn't reboot properly, I just left it for five minutes after letting go of the reset button, and then powered it off and on. Change your IP address configuration on your computer back to automatic, or whatever you had it set to. The stock firmware has IP address 192.168.0.1 by default.

makro wrote:

TP-Link doesn't differentiate between v1 and v1.3 on their website, and there doesn't seem to be any practical differences between v1 and v1.3 documented anywhere. I can't be sure, but I think the procedure should work equally well for all v1 devices. I didn't notice until now you also have a v1.3, same as mine.

A very detailed description, it assumes you use Windows:

- Download tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin as I linked to
- Download Tftpd32 zip file, the latest version is 4.50, and the file you should download is named tftpd32.450.zip
- Unzip the Tftpd32 zip file you just downloaded to somewhere
- Put the firmware image you downloaded at first in the same folder as tftpd32.exe, and rename it to "wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin"
- Set the IP address of the Ethernet interface you will use to 192.168.0.66, subnet mask 255.255.255.0. Guide for setting static IP address if you need it. You can leave the default gateway and DNS servers blank (ignore the warnings, you won't have internet access while you do this anyway), as long as you set the IP addresses to said values.
- Connect your router to your computer, but don't power it up yet.
- Run tftpd32.exe from wherever you have put it.
- Press "Show Dir" button, you should see the wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin file listed there. If you don't see it, you can press Browse to change to the directory where you have put it, or copy it to the Tftpd32 folder. Do what it takes to get wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin in the "Show Dir" list.
- Choose 192.168.0.66 from the Server interfaces dropdown menu in Tftpd32.
- Hold the reset button on your router, then power it up. Do not release the reset button at any point.
- Tftpd32 should report a transfer, it will show a progress bar. It is fairly quick, when the progress bar disappears the transfer is finished. Just to be safe, keep holding the reset button about 3 seconds after the progress bar on your computer disappears, then let go of the reset button. The router should still be powered on.

The router will now flash the firmware image and reboot. In my case it didn't reboot properly, I just left it for five minutes after letting go of the reset button, and then powered it off and on. Change your IP address configuration on your computer back to automatic, or whatever you had it set to. The stock firmware has IP address 192.168.0.1 by default.



Thanks Makro!! That's really helpful for me and I'll try it tonight with your procedure. Hopefully it can work like you said.

I'll give a feedback to you and here, maybe other people also need this lead later.

makro wrote:

TP-Link doesn't differentiate between v1 and v1.3 on their website, and there doesn't seem to be any practical differences between v1 and v1.3 documented anywhere. I can't be sure, but I think the procedure should work equally well for all v1 devices. I didn't notice until now you also have a v1.3, same as mine.

A very detailed description, it assumes you use Windows:

- Download tplink_wdr4900_v1_130424_noboot.bin as I linked to
- Download Tftpd32 zip file, the latest version is 4.50, and the file you should download is named tftpd32.450.zip
- Unzip the Tftpd32 zip file you just downloaded to somewhere
- Put the firmware image you downloaded at first in the same folder as tftpd32.exe, and rename it to "wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin"
- Set the IP address of the Ethernet interface you will use to 192.168.0.66, subnet mask 255.255.255.0. Guide for setting static IP address if you need it. You can leave the default gateway and DNS servers blank (ignore the warnings, you won't have internet access while you do this anyway), as long as you set the IP addresses to said values.
- Connect your router to your computer, but don't power it up yet.
- Run tftpd32.exe from wherever you have put it.
- Press "Show Dir" button, you should see the wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin file listed there. If you don't see it, you can press Browse to change to the directory where you have put it, or copy it to the Tftpd32 folder. Do what it takes to get wdr4900v1_tp_recovery.bin in the "Show Dir" list.
- Choose 192.168.0.66 from the Server interfaces dropdown menu in Tftpd32.
- Hold the reset button on your router, then power it up. Do not release the reset button at any point.
- Tftpd32 should report a transfer, it will show a progress bar. It is fairly quick, when the progress bar disappears the transfer is finished. Just to be safe, keep holding the reset button about 3 seconds after the progress bar on your computer disappears, then let go of the reset button. The router should still be powered on.

The router will now flash the firmware image and reboot. In my case it didn't reboot properly, I just left it for five minutes after letting go of the reset button, and then powered it off and on. Change your IP address configuration on your computer back to automatic, or whatever you had it set to. The stock firmware has IP address 192.168.0.1 by default.


Hi, Makro, I followed your steps. And now my router is back to stock firmware now!

After the WIFI networks are working again, I am able to flash the downloaded newer stock firmware and the router works as normal.

Thank you indeed. I would buy you a beer for your help! smile

Makro you are the best. I installed the dd-wrt s*hit and, my wdr4900 was in bad situation. THX so much for manual and help!!!!!

Thanks a lot Makro!

makro wrote:

A very detailed description, it assumes you use Windows:

It worked for me with the WDR4900 EU v1.3. I used TFTPD32 v4.52 (May 6th 2015)

My issue: the TP-Link did not detect a 1TB HDD (formatted NTFS or FAT32), so I hoped DD-WRT would do a better job. It didn't. It doesn't even have an option for external drives. The process to revert to stock firmware went wrong somehow leaving the WDR4900 useless. It didn't send an IP or anything. My computer just obtained the default one of windows. Something like 169....

Kind regards,
Cor

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