cAP ac bricked after update - netinstall not working

RouterOS General
1

Hi everybody,

I recently wanted to update my cAP ac to the latest version 6.45.7. During the update the internet connection went away, so I suppose, the download was incomplete. According to Mikrotik-support, the device will not install an incomplete download - anyhow, since then the cAP ac wasn’t reachable anymore.

Afterwards I tried multiple resets: config-reset, CAP-search, and finally netinstall.

I followed the instructions online so in Windows 10 all other network devices disabled, firewall disabled, netinstall running as administrator. After a few seconds I can see the device showing up in the top left window. I click that, browse to the routeros-arm-6.45.7.npk in the lower window and click install. I can briefly see the “sending offer” message, but no progress bar whatsoever appears.

The status field is cleared for some seconds, and then it is “ready” again.

With Wireshark I can see the cAP ac broadcasting BOOTP requests.

I also installed a DHCP/BOOTP/TFTP server on Linux. I can see the cAP ac connecting and downloading the npk-image. After the download is done, it starts downloading the image again after a few seconds.

I also soldered wires to the debug pads on the PCB, but I can only see the output of the OEM bootloader. As I learned from the OpenWRT site, Mikrotik disables the serial console right away for whatever reason.

My next plan is to make a dump of the NOR flash, but I haven’t got a SPI-dongle at hand. (Is it feasible to dump the flash using a Raspberry Pi?)

Sooo, I am stuck in a BOOTP loop and I would really like to revive that thing, because I don’t think it is a hardware problem…

Any help would be really appreciated. Low level technical questions are welcome! A 5 MB Wireshark dump of the netinstall-try is available.

2

“…I can briefly see the “sending offer” message, but no progress bar whatsoever appears…”

I had this before, and IIRC, what solved it for me was placing the ROS .npk file in the same folder as where I am running Netinstall from and then selecting that in Netinstall

3

Thanks, but no, that doesn’t help neither.

4

I was able to run Netinstall.exe under Windows XP on a damn old IBM Thinkpad R30 which I dug out of my basement.

With that insecure mess of an operating system the Netinstall went kinda smoothly.

But what bothers me the most is that this happened at all: that RouterOS installed a partly downloaded image after a connection failure…

…and that Netinstall.exe is legacy crappy software: It feels like some mouse pushing developer created that in the early days to test his own development work and somehow such a hack made it into production. (I mean, check that UI… :smiling_imp: )

5

I’m not so much worried about UI (my favourite is CLI and that one was made uh oh waaaay back in ancient history :wink: ), I’m worried about fragility of netinstall process … but I guess that’s mainly due to how windows handle networking and security.

6

Ohhh it would be so nice to have a CLI even in Windows which just prints errors to stdout which can easily be copy-pasted instead of posting screenshots from the moment some text flickers up for half a second… :laughing: Or even better: making a 100 MB screencast of the process and publish that via YouTube…

Still though, the regular upgrade process from the running ROS seems to be fragile, too. :open_mouth:

7

I just found this thread and tough it is six months old already I wanted to give other people the solution to the mentioned problem:

When you are trying to flash a Tik with netinstall with a modern operating system you’ve got to end the programm (netinstall) after the Tik shows up in the overview and RESTART IT RIGHT AWAY. After this is done you can start the process with no problems at all.

Just don’t forget to unplug your computer from ether1 after the flashing process is complete and you gave the command for reboot. It might brick the Tik again. Netinstall will not work on another device if the newly flashed and rebooted asks for FlashFig configuration during the boot.

Best regards
Areanod

8

Netinstall did not reply to etherboot requests when used on my Windows 10 x64 version 1909.
Using netinstall from a WinXP SP3 virtual machine bridged on the same network card worked perfectly.

Mikrotik shall probably fix netinstall for modern OS.

9

I also confirm.
on my win 10 64 bit netinstall not work.

i installed win xp on virtualbox (bridged) and now my cap ac is unbricked! and can boot!
thank you