Accidently bricked routerboard: Reprogram flash?

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

Hi everyone,

(To get to the point, see the TLDR at the end of the post.)

I am a massive networking noob, so I got the routerboard hAP ac lite to play with. I am using Windows 10 on my PC.

I was trying to configure dhcp and failing miserably, but i did notice that I had quite old firmware version ( 6.40.8 ). I also noticed that the WinBox was demanding that I use “legacy mode” to connect to it.

I googled around, and learned that apparently the way to stop using “legacy mode” is to update router-os. So I went to this guide:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_RouterOS
So I downloaded RouterOS for mipsbe, version 6.47.1 (stable) from here: https://mikrotik.com/download
I also downloaded the “extra packages”.

  • Then I connected to my Routerboard with FileZilla (as in guide).

Then I drag and dropped the Router OS npk, and all the extra npk’s into the root directory of the RouterBoard FTP server.

Then I powercycled it.

Since then, it seems to have been bricked. I then went to the netinstall method as described here:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Netinstall

This actually went apparently sucessfully: I did the thing where you hold “reset” until the “user” light turns off, connect the routerboard directly to my PC and then netinstall found the device. I gave the netinstall tool my routeros binary, and pressed “install”. The “install” button greyed out for a few seconds, and then became press-able again, from which I understand it sucessfully installed.

However, after power cycling the exact same bricked-like behaviour persisted. By which I mean, when I plug in the ethernet cable directly from my PC to the routerboard, my network adapters window flashes between “initalizing interface… Ethernet cable unplugged… initializing interface… Ethernet cable unplugged…”, etc. The indicator lights on the RouterBoard for the ethernet ports remain completely off, no sign of any activity.

So, at this stage I decided to crack the thing open. Hoping for a physical serial port, I didn’t find one (hopefully someone can confirm.) There’s a jtag debug header but I doubt I can reprogram the flash from it. I did, however, find a “W25Q128JVSM”, which is where I imagine all the binaries live?

TLDR:
So, I am thinking, I have a flash programmer, all I need to do is desolder it and re-flash it with a sane default. Can someone provide an official flash image for the MicroTik hAP ac lite? Heres the specific model: https://mikrotik.com/product/RB952Ui-5ac2nD

2

I don’t think there’s such thing. Desoldering chips and flashing them is very unofficial.

If it’s not completely dead and Netinstall seems to work, it should be possible to revive it using that. Try if different version works better.

3

If you reprogram the flash, most probably you will loose your license and I not believe that Mikrotik will give to you another to re-programing the flash memory.

If Netinstall not helps, anything will not be work.

Regards.

4

i’m a bit unsure about this. regardless what is in the files section, power cycle will not install anything. when you ‘reboot’ the device, it will first check whether the files are there, if so, it unpack them to the flash and execute some scripts.
your device, the hap ac lite has only 16MB flash, so the files section is in RAMdisk, which will be wiped on power outage.

installing routeros will not erase routerboot, so the user upgradeable or the factory default shall be there. so netinstall should be ok - as it also seems with your device.
you can however try to force the backup booter image - the one cannot be user-upgraded, just to make sure you tried it with a working one.

if this fails too, this might be a hw issue, most probably unrelated to your installation attempt. if the box is under warranty (12months) contact the place you bought it from.

if netinstall cannot access the flash to install a new operational routeros image, i don’t think you can do it yourself. there are no publicly available flash dumps.
if all hope is lost. you could try to hook on the onboard tx/rx/gnd pins with something 3.3V level serial adaptor to check if you see anything, but i bet those pins are deactivated by the boot loader.

5

Hi doneware (and everyone else),

You were right, I tried netinstall again, and this time it worked. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong last time, perhaps I was impatient, or nudged the ethernet cable on my table or something, but I got the latest routerOS installed, and now I can login without having to use legacy boot.

Thanks everyone for posting.

6

good to hear everything worked out finally :slight_smile: