I’m looking for some help with a hAP ax³ that appears to have a boot-level issue.
My brand-new router, which I purchased about three months ago, was working normally until yesterday. After resetting it to factory defaults to start with a clean configuration, the device no longer boots RouterOS and I’m unable to access it.
Reset procedure followed (per the manual)
Disconnected the power cable
Pressed and held the reset button
Reconnected the power while holding reset
Waited until the green LED started flashing
Released the reset button to clear the configuration
Waited several minutes for reboot
After this:
No Wi-Fi SSID appears
Router is not reachable over Ethernet
WinBox does not detect the device
RouterOS does not boot
LED behavior
Solid blue LED at power-on
Green LED flashes for ~5–7 seconds
Green LED becomes solid for 1–2 seconds
LED returns to solid blue
The green LED never keeps flashing for ~20 seconds as described for Netinstall mode.
Additional tests
Reset pressed before and after power
Held reset for 15s, 30s, and 60s
Tried Ether1 and Ether2
Different power-up/reset timing attempts
In all cases, the device never enters Netinstall mode.
No BOOTP requests
No TFTP requests
Device never appears in Netinstall
WinBox never sees the router by MAC
Does this behavior indicate a hardware fault (bootloader or internal flash issue) on the hAP ax³?Is there any recovery option beyond Ethernet Netinstall, or should this unit be considered faulty?
It's very unlikely that a reset damaged the router. Anyway, the bootloader is only written to when you upgrade the firmware (routerboot), but even then, the backup bootloader remains available.
Your best and most certain way out of this is netinstall. If you've never done it before it can be difficult and daunting. All sorts of things can cause problems: the link up on ether1 is not fast enough (solution is to put a dumb switch between the device and your pc - this is made worse by the port being 2.5G), firewall, multiple interfaces being available, not setting up networking properly/manually...
Just fyi: the green led is only supposed to flash for 5s, so based on your description what you're seeing is normal and the bootloader seems fine.
Anyway, I'd attempt to repeat the reset procedure. Let go of the reset button while the led is flashing.
EDIT: And make sure that the reset button is not broken...
I’ve repeated the reset procedure several times following the timing exactly: holding the reset button, powering on the router, watching the LED, and releasing the reset as soon as the LED starts flashing (not before or after). Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed anything. No Wi-Fi SSID appears, the router isn’t reachable over Ethernet, and WinBox doesn’t detect the device.
The reset button itself seems physically fine. The LED behavior changes depending on how long I hold the button, so it does appear to be working correctly. I’ve only used the reset button a handful of times overall probably no more than 10 times since I bought the device about three months ago.
One challenge is that I’m using macOS, not Windows, which makes Netinstall a bit harder to work with. At the moment I’m not sure what else I can try beyond repeating the reset and preparing for Netinstall.
I also wanted to ask about the Mode button. Does it affect anything related to reset or boot behavior? Are there any reset + mode combinations, or could the mode button disable or block something? I’ve never used the mode button before, so I just want to rule that out.
Thanks for the great suggestion Mate, I tried that and ran Wireshark on my Mac while booting the router and repeating the reset procedure on ether1.
I do see traffic coming from the router, so it’s definitely alive. I’m seeing MNDP as well as CDP/LLDP frames identifying the device as a MikroTik, and it looks like it’s booting RouterOS normally (LLDP even reports RouterOS 7.20.6 and the model string).
What I’m not seeing at all is any BOOTP or TFTP traffic coming from the router. The only DHCP Discover packets in the capture are from my Mac, not from the MikroTik. Based on that, it doesn’t seem like the router is ever entering Netinstall mode — it just boots RouterOS every time, even when I repeat the reset timing.
So it looks like the device isn’t bricked, but I’m missing something when it comes to forcing Netinstall mode or default access. If there’s a specific reset timing, LED pattern, or RouterBOOT detail for this model that I should be aware of, I’d really appreciate the guidance.
Do you own a Intel Mac or Apple Silicon mac ?
If intel you may try to boot some live cd image from usb, and work from there (If you don't have a PC).
The netinstall-cli on Linux is the best app for un-bricking MT devices, you can read a lot of threads in this forum about it.
All my laptops are Apple Silicon (M1) as well, so unfortunately I don’t have an Intel Mac or a PC available to boot a Linux live USB on. Because of that I’m limited to macOS for now.
I’ll still try from another M1 laptop with a clean setup (single Ethernet interface, Wi-Fi and sharing disabled) to rule out any local configuration issues. If that doesn’t change anything, I may need to borrow a Windows or Linux machine to test netinstall-cli.
I see, but if you are very knowledge on computers, like what i see in the text you has written so far, you can take a look at this repo with python code to deploy RouterOS and maybe using homebrew to get of some of the tools like dnsmasq.
Thanks a lot for that suggestion, that’s a really good idea. Since I’m on Apple Silicon only, I can’t boot a Linux live USB, so using something like pynetinstall on macOS could be a good approach.
Right now I’m still trying to reliably trigger Etherboot mode (my captures show the router booting RouterOS normally, but no BOOTP/TFTP yet). Once I get past that step, I’ll definitely try this macOS-based Netinstall setup.
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes
thanks again for pointing me in that direction and for all the help so far.
That seems like the router is alive. Just to be clear: you are either in netinstall mode, which is handled entirely by the bootloader, in which case ether1 is the port you have to use, OR you've booted the OS and you can use any port except ether1, which is firewalled by default.
If you see MNDP messages, Winbox should be able to see the router in the Neighbors section.
You enter netinstall mode by holding down the reset button for a really long time during and after power on. Ideally until the device appears in the netinstall list. Your device doing DHCP discovers probably means that the network interface is misconfigured.
The best for unbricking is to use a windows or linux computer. Even raspberry pis work okay.
I think it's much more probable that something simply went wrong during device reset and you'll be able to reach the device on ether2 after bootup using the mac protocol connection from winbox. What exactly could be going wrong I can't really say; unfortunately I'm not experienced enough on macs, doubly so on arm macs. One thing you could try is to manually configure an address such as 192.168.88.10/24 on the interface...