Factory firmware upgrade

RouterOS General
1

Hi to all, before write this post I searched on interet and here into the forum but I don’t find an answer.
I’m an happy owner of an HAP ac with a factory firmare version at 6.42.10
Is it so difficult (and maybe is not possible) to upgrade it to a 7.x version?

Thank you.

Ciao ciao,

Marco

Unable to change the factory firmware on my hAPac2
2

It’s easy. Just use the built-in upgrade in Winbox. You might have to do it a few times. The first time it will upgrade to the newest 6.x and then do it again and it will go to somewhere around 7.12, and then do it again and it will go to 7.14

3

Still be careful…

hAP AC only has 16Mb of storage.
As of 7.13, legacy wifi part is stored in a separate package causing potential issues for devices with limited storage (and 16Mb is on the low end !).

You may want to stop at 7.12.x and wait for 7.15 to come out as stable, it appears there have been some storage optimizations in there.

4

IIRC, hitting upgrade in v6 will only go up to latest v6 (depending on channel used it’ll be either 6.49.13 or 6.49.15). To go beyond that, one has to change channel to upgrade, at which point it’ll go up to 7.12.1 (channel will revert to “stable” automatically after upgrade). And upgrade routerboot again to 7.12.1.

When device is at 6.49.13 (or .15), don’t forget to upgrade routerboot (System → RouterBOARD → Upgrade) as ancient routerboots may have problems booting ROS v7.

I suggest you to take another path to upgrades though:

  1. make configuration export
    open terminal window, then execute command /export file=anynameyouwish, fetch it off device to your management computer
  2. upgrade to 6.49.13 as described earlier, upgrade routerboot
  3. netinstall the device to 7.12.1
    It’s a fragile process so you may struggle to get it done. When doing it, add wireless package, available from extras ZIP archive.
    Also, when doing it, don’t select “keep configuration”
  4. using winbox (click MAC address) connect to upgraded device, reset it to factory defaults and proceed from new default config
    Use exported config (step #1; open file in text editor) as reminder about specifics. Specially try to keep firewall settings as much to the defaults … these changed in past few years and are very sensible now (not so much in the past) so before adding something, study the new philosophy of rules (e.g. they rely on proper interface list management which has to be done manually), don’t just blindly copy over the old rules as they likely won’t work unaltered.
    After you finish the configuration, upgrade routerboot to latest available (7.12.1).

The point of doing netinstall (versus simple upgrade mentioned in previous posts) is that it does purge old config (which may use up additional storage space and you can’t clear it otherwise) and it does upgrade your config to new base line (which is much better than it was in 6.42 times). My own experience is that performance also increased (by how much depends on how screwed the previous configuration was) after netinstalling device (although v7 usually performs slightly to considerably slower than v6 with similar configuration).

And I concur with @holvoetn regarding waiting for 7.15. after installing 7.12.1.

5

Hi guys, first thank you so much for all your replies.
Maybe I wrote wrong but I would upgrade factory firmare as attached picture.
Is it possible?

Thank you,

Marco
mikrotik.png

6

Just click on the “upgrade” button

7

No, the info you marked is immutable. In practice it’s used to determine earliest version of firmware that can be installed on a device (yes, it’s possible to downgrade firmware).

And same principle applies to RouterOS itself (in System → Packages …)


What you can (and should) do is hit the “Upgrade” button, which will bring the “Current Firmware” to version listed under “Upgrade Firmware”.

8

There is a method to upgrade the factory firmware (or backup bootloader) outlined here:

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/RouterBOARD#RouterBOARD-Protectedbootloader

Do note the warnings that this process is potentially dangerous:

A special package is provided to upgrade the backup RouterBOOT (DANGEROUS).

9

Hi to all guys,
thank you indeed for your replies.
I’ll try.

Ciao ciao,

Marco

10

Hi,

I'm not sure this is a good place to ask, though.

I tried to follow the info below to update Backup Bootloader with hAP ax2, but failed with log "failed to upgrade backup booter: Unknown RB"

I guess " v7 universal package for all architectures" described in the page doesn't support hAP ax2. Is it possible to get a compatible version?

Same happened with hEx S(2025).

Thanks in advance!

11

Did you also take into account this not so unimportant remark ?

Support on older MikroTik hardware

This section only applies to older devices that display a particular error message! Do not change the bootloader without seeing a message instructing you to do it.

12

@jose365

You risked bricking your devices, you were lucky that some protections were added to that package to prevent that, it happened initially on RB5009, JFYI: