3rd time a router doesn't boot after power failure

RouterOS General
1

After powering down a Chateau 5G router and then powering it up again, the device doesn’t boot. This is the 3rd time for the last 4 months. During these 4 months there were other powering down/up cycles and everything was okay.

The only solution I’ve found so far is to put the device in a netinstall mode, reformat and reinstall the RouterOS and reconfigure it from scratch. I don’t know how to extract a support file before reformating.

The symptoms are:

  1. Power down the device
  2. Power up the device
  3. Within the first 10-25 seconds the router is activating its LAN ports
  4. Then it shuts the LAN ports down and freezes
  5. Only the power blue led is lit.

Can you guys suggest anything that can help us understand if this is a software or hardware issue?

BR!

2

You should (IMHO) open a ticket with support, providing a supout file, to make one:
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Supout.rif

3

I just opened a ticket to the support as well.

Still when the router is in that “brainwashed” state I cannot generate and/or download any supout file.

4

WIthout any actual data to support the idea, it sounds like a hardware issue connected to power.

Not necessarily with Mikrotik hardware but in my experience a power supply can (silently) fail (partially), i.e. start delivering some lower voltage but more commonly the right voltage but not enough “juice”.

Usually at boot there is a small surge of the power needed, and a defective power supply may be not able to provide it (while later it is fine with the “normal” power required).

The Chateau 5G accepts a rather large range 12-28V (its original power supply is 1.2A@24V), so you might have handy a suitable power supply to test the device with (personally I have an el-cheapo “universal” laptop replacement power supply, capable of 12/15/16/18/19/20/24 V, one of those with replaceable connectors that I keep only to be able to test this kind of issues).

5

Additional info:

I have the router in this “not booting state” connected to a laptop. I noticed that every 6 minutes the laptops’ ethernet LAN adapter becomes active for around 20 seconds and then it goes down again. This is a clear sign that the router is in some loop state and it is not completely dead. Or may be this is just the watchdog rebooting the router.

I am running wireshark on the laptops’ LAN adapter and I there is not a single package coming from the router.