Asus AC68U dead

[Ice_be]

Hello,

I bought myself an AC68U last month and immediately installed AsusWRT-Merlin.

Everything has been good untill now, but now my router seems to be dead.
What happened is:
- I pulled out the power cord.
- I put it back in the socket
- My router didn't boot.

All it does is lighting up the 4 LAN LEDs and the WAN LED.

I tried getting into recovery mode, but it doesn't seem to work.

I didn't do anything fancy to its configuration. I just enabled jffs and added some lines to the dnsmasq config for using unblock us for all my netflix trafic.

Is there anything I can try to fix this? Or should I try to return it to the store?

Thanks in advance!

 

[RMerlin]

Try powering it up with the Reset button pressed for 5-10 secs, then releasing it. If the power led doesn't flash, then try again but this time with the WPS button to do a factory default reset, and see if it boots normally with its factory settings (IP will revert to 192.168.1.1 if it had been changed).

If that still fails, you will have to get it replaced.

 

[Ice_be]

The solutions you mentioned didn't work so I got it replaced.

But now I'm worried if I install Merlin on it again that the same thing would happen again. Or do you think this wasn't a firmware related issue?

 

[Engineer]

The solutions you mentioned didn't work so I got it replaced.

But now I'm worried if I install Merlin on it again that the same thing would happen again. Or do you think this wasn't a firmware related issue?

From my experience in life, it would be hardware. Most electronic failures that I've seen in my life happen very early in the cycle (within a few weeks) or after a LONG time (many years). Usually no in-between. I suspect that the hardware was marginal and the power cycle killed it.

I had a RT-N16 that has run for 5 years. I unplugged it a few months ago and it never came back up. The flash memory seems to be dead since I'm unable to flash it in any manner that I've tried (short of a JTAG unit). I did get it to partially work one time by baking it in a 250 degree oven for 15 minutes. It stopped working after it cooled down though!