Thu May 12, 2022 5:06 am
I'm from Farmington myself. Currently lost in PA at the moment, but it is what it is...
Since you probably have good patch cables, and the NIC in your laptop probably works just fine, I would suggest making sure you have the latest version of Winbox and then setting a static IP of something like 192.168.88.250 on your laptop and leave the gateway and dns blank. Also turn off WiFi, cellular, or any other network connections so it's just your laptop and the radio with no other stuff in the way.
Then plug everything in and use the neighbors tab in winbox and hit the refresh every once in a while. Wait at least 5 minutes before you give up because I have seen some RouterOS updates on both the V6 and V7 stable channels take several minutes to complete. My only thought here is that if a firmware update somehow got borked, it might actually take a bit longer than a normal bootup to see anything.
If the radio boots at all, and you can confirm that you have an ethernet link alive to the radio, you should see the devices mac address show up in the neighbors list. Using winbox with a reasonably default device configuration you can actually double click on the mac address and connect to the radio that way without even worrying about your IP settings.
If you never see it in the neighbors list, go to tools, and turn on legacy mode. If the radio has ancient software for some reason legacy mode might help.
If none of the above works, my next step would be using the reset button to try to load default settings and trying all of the above again. This is fairly easy: Power off, hold reset button, power on, release button when the user light starts flashing.
If that fails, then you'll probably want to perform a netinstall. There are a few guides here and there for netinstall. There are 2 things to watch out for with netinstall:
1. Make sure the windows firewall is not blocking anything, if you have local admin for the machine, netinstall will ask for a firewall exception. It needs this because the radio will actually TFTP a boot image from that instance of netinstall, boot, and then grab whatever version of routeros you are trying to netinstall.
2. Hold the reset button until your device shows up in the netinstall list. Sometimes this takes like 2 minutes. Power off, hold the button, power on and keep holding the button until you see the radio in the list.
A potential third confusion for netinstall is that there is a field for netboot IP. This is the IP that your device will become after it completes the install. If this is the same as your computer IP, you'll have a conflict and potential problems. Connecting using the mac address in winbox and then configuring all the IP stuff helps in those cases.
Good luck, and I keep trying to send the rain that way...