I have upgraded the SwOS of my CRS328-24P-4S+RM from 2.15 to 2.17 and had some compatibility issues with a CRS354-48G-4S+2Q+RM (SFP ports did not connect), so I tried downgrading SwOS back to 2.16 (2.14 and 2.15 were not available, factory only) but the switch didn’t came back to life.
Now the power light, all network ports light and the FAN/PoE fault lights keep on (never turning off) when the switch is on.
At the serial port I just get immediately the attachment’s data after powering on, nothing more, nothing less, every time. Not a single response when I press any key, and keeps like this indefinitely.
Netinstall was a dead end as well, switch not even gets recognized.
I also tried Mikrotik support, but they don’t seem to understand the case, they said it’s unfixable.
IMHO this board needs a serial boot file (that’s what the serial output is asking for) to star with or a NAND reflash to fix it for good.
I have already bought some flash memory reader/writer to try something if needed.
It’s not possible that I should throw away a perfectly good switch because a single firmware upgrade has gone wrong…
I have the exact same error messages in the serial console output after a failed firmware upgrade on the same Mikrotik CRS328-24P-4S+RM after clicking the download+upgrade button in SwOS. I also have not been able to get netinstall to recognize the device to allow new firmware to be installed. If you found/find a solution I would love to hear it.
It looks like the downgrade may have corrupted the NAND or bootloader, which is why the switch shows solid LEDs and doesn’t respond via serial or Netinstall. The serial output suggests it’s looking for a boot image, which likely means it needs either a serial boot file or a full NAND reflash. Since MikroTik support isn’t helping much, your best option now is to use your flash programmer to write a clean NAND dump from another working CRS328-24P-4S+RM. Just make sure to back up the current chip first. You can also try pushing MikroTik support again and mention you have UART access and are ready for manual recovery if they can provide a recovery image.
Well, this happened to me today although without downgrade. A simple SWOS download&upgrade bricked the switch. It was running happily for months at 2.17 and today I dared to upgrade to 2.18. After the restart the switch never comes back, all lights are on and the serial console shows the same output as in the original post. I have contacted my distributor for RMA. I can not advise to update to 2.18.
I’m sorry that I do not have posted any updates here, but we have had to buy a new switch as a replacement, RMA was not available for me.
I also bought a NAND flash reader and did the dump of the current flash state.
It appears to me that the Mikrotik updater has messed up some pointers because there was a SwOS flashed in the wrong place (don’t ask me how I know this, I have compared dozen of images with the broken flash file to find out), but the mikrotik variables are intact, I just need the bootloader part to fix it…
I also tried to compile a uboot to send through serial, but the uboot compiler needs the bootloader file, the one thing that I don’t have.
What I really do not understand is why is it so hard for Mikrotik to provide the serial image or the bootloader for us to correct their mistakes…
My plan (due to when I have some spare time) is getting the entire flash through a modified software in the working new switch, to extract the bootloader and fix the flash of the broken switch.
I should not need to do all this to fix a software issue, common Mikrotik, help us here!
About this, I really tried several times before posting here in the forum, I did explained a lot and very detailed, they sent me to RMA everytime…
I do not believe that this is a single version update issue, this is a problem they might have with the SwOS updater, the memory pointer could be missing some checks or it can have another memory related problem… Of course, this is just speculation, based on what I saw in my corrupted flash memory.