Recover Device

RouterOS General
1

While testing some configs in our lab someone managed to lock themselves out of a CRS125-25G-1S with a config that was somehow causing the device to lock up and freeze at boot, and would not accept any external connections and couldn’t login thorough the console either.

The usual procedure would be a reset, however normal reset didn’t work as it had the following parameters set:

   /system routerboard settings set protected-routerboot=enabled reformat-hold-button=60s

This employee then proceeded to hold the reset button for 60s and triggered the reformat with the intent to netinstall, however after doing so when connected to the console cable the message below keeps appearing before it reboots, and there’s seemingly no way past this.

RouterBOOT booter 7.7

CRS125-24G-1S

CPU frequency: 600 MHz
 Memory speed: 200 MHz
  Memory size: 128 MiB
    NAND size: 128 MiB

loading kernel... kernel not found or data is corrupted

In nearly 20 years I’ve never ran into a MT that I was unable to recover somehow. Any suggestions or is this one truly bricked with no option for recovery on account of protected-routerboot being enabled?

[edited to clarify…]

2

Full formatting in this case can last 5-10 minutes. It seems that the device was rebooted without waiting for the formatting to complete.
Try resetting, booting from the main bootloader, booting from the backup bootloader again.

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:RouterBOARD_settings#Protected_bootloader

3

I’ll try resetting again, but the device wasn’t unplugged after the reset button was held, it immediately went into the boot loop described above.

4

As long as routerboot is working (seems to be), you should be able to initiate netinstall procedure and recover the device. Note that reformat and netinstall (netboot) are two completely different things and you don’t need to reformat flash/nand to be able to do netinstall…

5

You have used linux? Try with option -r
If is windows, do not keep previous config with netinstall and do not apply default config.