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Topic: Linksys WRT3200acm

The content of this topic has been archived on 20 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hi guys, need some answer about wrt3200.
I come from an old WRT320N flashed with Tomato...running since 2009 now dropping dead...but Tomato does not support Marvell 88E6352  and so i can't flash my brand new wrt3200 with it.
The questions are:
- Chaos Calmer does not support wrt3200, right?
- Lede is the only stable firmware?
- Can i flash "as it is", without making any partition?
- Can i easily rollback to Linksys firmware or "migrate" to DD-WRT?
- What about wifi? Is it true that it has major issues (i.e. loss of signal, difficult on 5ghz, and tons of other stuff)?

Thanx in advance.

(Last edited by pulque on 20 Nov 2017, 21:04)

pulque wrote:

Hi guys, need some answer about wrt3200.
I come from an old WRT320N flashed with Tomato...running since 2009 now dropping dead...but Tomato does not support Marvell 88E6352  and so i can't flash my brand new wrt3200 with it.
The questions are:
- Chaos Calmer does not support wrt3200, right?
- Lede is the only stable firmware?
- Can i flash "as it is", without making any partition?
- Can i easily rollback to Linksys firmware or "migrate" to DD-WRT?
- What about wifi? Is it true that it has major issues (i.e. loss of signal, difficult on 5ghz, and tons of other stuff)?

Thanx in advance.

@pulque

1 "- Chaos Calmer does not support wrt3200, right?"  Not that I'm aware and if it did I wouldn't use it as it's too old.
2 "- Lede is the only stable firmware?"  Yes
3 "- Can i flash "as it is", without making any partition?" Yes -- Make sure you flash with .img and do not keep ANY settings. Start fresh with a clean slate.
4 "- Can i easily rollback to Linksys firmware or "migrate" to DD-WRT?" Yes  -- Just follow the rollback procedure.
5 "- What about wifi? Is it true that it has major issues (i.e. loss of signal, difficult on 5ghz, and tons of other stuff)?"  Since the firmware and wifi Driver are based on Linsys Closed Source drivers/firmware... I would expect very similar performance and availability until just recently. Not to say it hasn't had it's problems, because before June, wifi really wasn't usable at all. Here recently with the Wifi Krack patches, there's been an issue with clients trying to re-join which causes the router to reboot.. This condition may take an hour or could take 4 days or longer, but is actively being worked on. There have been a lot of issues with Enterprise level situations where people are trying to run Radius or some other Enterprise type of authentication systems and are having issues. Anyhow, there are 6 current issues, and you can read about them --> https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues  The host command timeout is the major issue being worked.

Thanx.
The file.img has to be renamed in .bin to run the flasher?

pulque wrote:

Thanx.
The file.img has to be renamed in .bin to run the flasher?

This doesn't sound right to me. You should be flashing .img without any renaming.  Maybe there's something up with Tomato? I've never used it so I wouldn't know.

make sure you pick the factory not sysupgrade version to flash if it still has factory linksys firmware.

There are two firmware partitions in the 3200acm, when you flash it will flash to the other partition and automatically boot to it.  So if you get linksys when you reboot it did recovery and now you have one bad flash partition.  come for help before you flash again if that happens to avoid bricking.

Ok, thanx everybody.

Pleas don't keep using Tomato.. It has more holes than a Swiss cheese! If I was to post about all the bugs in it I would get band from the forums for spamming! :-D

Last question.
The factory release is a .img while the sysupgrade is .bin: is it correct? Can WRT3200 flash a .img extension?

davidc502 wrote:
pulque wrote:

Thanx.
The file.img has to be renamed in .bin to run the flasher?

This doesn't sound right to me. You should be flashing .img without any renaming.  Maybe there's something up with Tomato? I've never used it so I wouldn't know.

Hi davidc502.
I've seen your custom fw: can you give me a link with specs?
Thanx

pulque wrote:
davidc502 wrote:
pulque wrote:

Thanx.
The file.img has to be renamed in .bin to run the flasher?

This doesn't sound right to me. You should be flashing .img without any renaming.  Maybe there's something up with Tomato? I've never used it so I wouldn't know.

Hi davidc502.
I've seen your custom fw: can you give me a link with specs?
Thanx

https://davidc502sis.dynamic-dns.net/

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