Cannot upgrade fresh rb450gx1 to 7.12.1, not enough space

RouterOS General
1

I want to migrate to 7.x, and my plan is to put 7.12.1 (which I believe is the stepping off point for migrating 6.x configurations) on a spare 450gx4 I have, replace my existing 6.latest 450gx4 with that, and then once I’ve assessed performance get something more modern.

So I have taken the spare, unused 450gx4, which claims to have 512MB of NAND flash, and updated it. Or not: not enough space.

For various reasons it will be painful to use netinstall, but if I have to I’ll do that. In the meantime, what I have donw is downgraded to 6.44.1 and then gone back to 6.49.13 with “unbundling” so that the device only has system, routing, dhcp and security on it,

[

admin@MikroTik] > /system package update download 
            channel: upgrade
  installed-version: 6.49.13
     latest-version: 7.12.1
             status: Downloaded, please reboot router to upgrade it

[admin@MikroTik] > /system package print
Flags: X - disabled 
 #   NAME                             VERSION                             SCHEDULED              
 0   dhcp                             6.49.13                                                    
 1   security                         6.49.13                                                    
 2   system                           6.49.13                                                    
 3   routing                          6.49.13                                                    
[admin@MikroTik] >

[[ reboot: I can’t catch the message on the serial, but… ]]

20:40:18 system,error broken package dhcp-7.12.1-arm.npk 
20:40:18 system,error broken package routing-7.12.1-arm.npk 
20:40:18 system,error broken package security-7.12.1-arm.npk 
20:40:18 system,info installed system-7.12.1 
20:40:18 system,error not enough space for upgrade

but there’s plenty of space

[admin@MikroTik] > /system resource print 
 [...]
        free-memory: 966.6MiB
       total-memory: 1024.0MiB
 [...]
     free-hdd-space: 431.0MiB
    total-hdd-space: 512.3MiB
[admin@MikroTik] >

I guess I’ll need to use Netinstall (I don’t have a machine to run it on handy, although I can get one) but it’d be nice to make this work.

2

I’m afraid it will be netinstall-time.

3

Thanks, and yes, that worked.

[[ I had tried netinstall on a machine with VLANs before, which is the only quick way I can get netinstall running. It didn’t work then, but it does now: I built a clean VLAN which, critically, didn’t have any other DHCP server in it, brought an interface up on a Linux machine pointing into that VLAN, and used the -a flag to pick an address in the VLAN. It’s now up, and it took about two minutes. I should have tried that first ]]

[admin@MikroTik] > /system/routerboard/print                           
       routerboard: yes
             model: RB450Gx4
     serial-number: B8D00A3C6A57
     firmware-type: ipq4000
  factory-firmware: 6.44.1
  current-firmware: 6.49.13
  upgrade-firmware: 7.12.1
[admin@MikroTik] >
4

Make sure to update routerboot firmware as well.

5

Would really like to know how 512 MB of storage can be “not enough” while Mikrotik is doing anything so devices with 16 MB of storage can be updated?
Well OK it looks like I got it solved - I tried to manually upload 7.12.1 and 7.12.2 and both failed.

Then I tried to upload 7.7 and it was able to upgrade to this. Subsequent upgrades from inside Winbox succeesed as well. It looks like something is wrong with 7.12.x or 6.49.x

6

Downgrade to an older smaller 6.x firmware. Then upgrade to 7.12.1

7

Try that and if it does not work, then get older version of v7 from download archive and try with that (others might work as well but 7.7 should work for sure).

I tried with 7.7 because I did first v6 → v7 upgrade of 450Gx4 when 7.7 was current version and then upgrade succeeded straight away. If downgrading v6 to older version does not solve the problem then it might be that problem lies in 7.12.1. After I did manual upgrade to 7.7 I was able to do upgrades 7.7 → 7.12.1 → 7.13.4 without problems from package menu.