I’ve just got a refurbished (CRS125-24G-IN) unit. It was “thrown out” because It was “not working”. As much as I know about the device the problem was while they tried to do a firmware upgrade the power gone out, and since it is “wrecked”. I’ve got it yesterday. My first try was to reset it via the reset pin, and the device booted totally working (as far as I can see, this is my first mikrotik router). The web interface, the winbox connection and even the touch screen is working just fine. My main problem is, that I want to do a totally fresh install with netinstall. Now that’s where the problems begin.
Ether boot problem:
When I’m holding the reset button and powering on the device it is going into ether boot, but only for a good 1-4 seconds, after this period it is starting just normally despite of me holding the button! I’ve tried to issue a command from the terminal (in winbox), it does the same. The netinstall client is NOT showing the device no matter how hard I try (tried 2 different PCs, multiple network cards, run as administrator and without it, allowing it on the firewall or turning the firewall fully off and so on).
The upgrade anomaly:
My thoughts were: Okay let’s try to update from the current to v6.47.7! So I’ve followed a guide saying just copy the new firmware to files on winbox so I did. After a reboot, the device started to act weirdly. It was constantly booting to ether boot mode waiting for a bit then rebooting. I thought it was weird but maybe normal until the 8th minute. So I don’t think that is an intended behaviour. After a good 20 minutes it was still doing its rebooting, ethboot, reboot thingy so I pulled the plug, and reseted via the reset pin. The funny thing is it actually shows RouterOS v6.47.7 (stable) in the web gui after all this, so It maybe upgraded?
My questions are:
Is there a way to do a totally new netinstall on the device with all of it’s weirdness, if so how?
Do you think It is possible that it has some sort of chip error or something that can’t be repaired home in order to restore this beauty to it’s fullest?
Some device informations:
CPU MIPS 74KC V4.12
Total HHD size: 128 MiB
Total Sector Writes: 199
Bad Blocks: 0.0%
Architecture Name: mipsbe
Board Name: CRS125-24G-1S
Version: 6.47.7 (stable)
Build Time: Oct/27/2020 13:27:21
Factory Software: 6.39
Thanks in advance!
If I’m missing some details please let me know I’ll update the post with them.
If it shows 6.47.7 (stable), it did upgrade. Part of the upgrade procedure is also a configuration conversion, and it may have failed, causing the reboots; by resetting it to factory default, you’ve removed the cause of the reboot.
What does system routerboard settings print show?
When something is wrong with the reset button, it may be possible to make the system boot in netinstall mode using system routerboard settings set boot-device=try-ethernet-once-then-nand and then rebooting. After that reboot, the system goes into netinstall mode; if it doesn’t find netinstall, it reverts to NAND boot, and changes the boot-device setting back to the regular one, so on the next reboot the attempt for netinstall mode is not taken.
Netinstall is a complicated thing as after all those years it still chooses an interface to work at autonomously, so you have to disable all interfaces except the Ethernet one you want to use; I’ve even seen a report here that it choose the loopback interface for answering - this interface is added by npcap if you have installed it, which typically happens if you use Wireshark, and it is not shown in the interface list in the control panel so you cannot disable it there. On my previous laptop, I had issues with uploading the software - netinstall did find the router, but the “upload” took something like two or three seconds and did not actually happen. To overcome this, I had to close netinstall once it has detected the connected router and start it again. This has also been reported by other users. But it was several netinstall versions ago, maybe this issue has been fixed since then.
I don’t think you can fix an issue like this at home if the device works fine otherwise. If the device behaves strange in general, it is often caused by deterioration of electrolytic capacitors in the power adaptor - I’ve had devices (not Mikrotik ones) which were fine themselves but every 3 years or so the power adaptor needed replacement, and of course the replacement one was not an original one but its life until the same symptoms appeared was approximately similar. But your device seems to work more or less fine - these glitches after upgrade are rare but unfortunately do happen.