378.56 - Restarts & Unable to Downgrade

[Lazy]

I bought the RT-AC66U off of ebay. The first thing I did was upgrade it to the latest Merlin & factory reset it so I have no knowledge on the router's prior abilities.

The router restarts on its own every 10 minutes... I thought maybe there was a bug in the firmware so I tried to downgrade it to the latest ASUS firmware and cannot. I see the upload progress bar showing that it is applying settings, etc... and then suddenly it'll go back to the login screen with Merlin still installed.

Overall I'm confused where to even begin with troubleshooting if it's hardware, etc. What logs or steps would be the starting point?

 

[DaveMishSr]

I bought the RT-AC66U off of ebay. The first thing I did was upgrade it to the latest Merlin & factory reset it so I have no knowledge on the router's prior abilities.

The router restarts on its own every 10 minutes... I thought maybe there was a bug in the firmware so I tried to downgrade it to the latest ASUS firmware and cannot. I see the upload progress bar showing that it is applying settings, etc... and then suddenly it'll go back to the login screen with Merlin still installed.

Overall I'm confused where to even begin with troubleshooting if it's hardware, etc. What logs or steps would be the starting point?

Try the following (courtesy of RMerlin):

1) Unplug the power, then turn the router on to drain any residual power. Give it 10 seconds, turn it off, then plug it back in.
2) Turn it on with the reset button pressed, to enter Firmware Recovery mode. Power should now be flashing slowly
3) Set your PC to 192.168.1.100 (or 192.168.xxx.100, it must match your previous subnet). Important: make sure you do NOT use Port 1. That port does not work in recovery mode, because it's part of the Realtek switch.
4) Make sure your PC is only connected to that one router. Disable its wifi if it was connected to your other router at the same time
5) Try using the firmware recovery tool from Asus.

These instructions are for the AC87x platform so I don't know if the deal with Port 1 still applies or not. Good luck!

 

[Lazy]

Hello!

I cleared the NVRam. I then used the ASUS Firmware Recovery Tool to successfully downgrade the firmware to the latest ASUS version.

However... the router still restarts after ~10 minutes. This leads me to believe there is an unrecoverable hardware issue.

Thoughts?

 

[namtih]

Temperature is good?
cat /proc/dmu/temperature

Anything in "dmesg" or the "/tmp/syslog.log" (it's /tmp/ in the RMerlin version).
Is any USB drive connected which perhaps causes the reboot because of an corrupted filesystem?
Any chance to test another power supply?

 

[TonyH]

Hello!

I cleared the NVRam. I then used the ASUS Firmware Recovery Tool to successfully downgrade the firmware to the latest ASUS version.

However... the router still restarts after ~10 minutes. This leads me to believe there is an unrecoverable hardware issue.

Thoughts?

Simple and basic things first. Try another AC adapter.