RT-AC3200 recovery / rescue mode - ignore bad internet instructions.

[vibroverbus]

Second 'obsolete router notes' post of the day for me. This one even smaller crowd of potential interested audience.... but for " the benefit of others stuck in "have to repurpose some old stuff for some reason" mode.... Because of reasons I was working through my piles of old ASUS routers to use as a wireless-to-ethernet bridge this weekend.

First up was ye old RT-AC3200 because hey why not see if it still works, well.... it did not, trying to firmware reset the unit left it soft bricked. After some screwing around I gave up on it at first as I had other units to try, but then in the end returned to it and with further effort got it recovered completely fine, despite some 'bad info' out there.

I know this model is a bit derided and disliked because of its oddball hardware and triple radio weird config but just in case somebody else is still trying to make one work and especially because I kept following incorrect instructions from old AC3200 threads......

• Use 192.168.1.x for static IP on the PC (standard procedure obv, and other threads are correct on this). I used 192.168.1.9 or 10 I think I don't recall.
• CONNECT TO THE WAN PORT of the router. NOT THE LAN PORTS as is firmly instructed in some old threads for this model. This was the biggest most-wrongest problem.
• Put it into Rescue/Recovery mode by holding the RESET button while powering up. NOT the WPS button as is firmly instructed in some old threads for this model.
• If you have slow-flash Power LED then yes you are in Rescue/Recovery mode.
• Helps to do the usual ping 192.168.1.1 /t in a command window so you can see when it starts to respond.
• In the end I used TFTP to send the file however I would be fairly confident that the ASUS Firmware Restoration Tool will also work. I tried the FRT at first but only as I was banging my head against using the LAN port because of the completely erroneous instructions, then shifted to a TFTP client trying to sort this out. When that worked over WAN port I didn't want to try any further but I bet FRT would work fine too.

After this works I had a bit of flashback deja vu like I think I have had this problem with bad threads insisting on 'don't connect to WAN port!' with router recovery before. At least for this unit, WAN port is very much what you need to connect to.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Can you remove the white/grey colour attributes from your text as it makes it nearly invisible when viewed with certain themes. Thanks.

 

[vibroverbus]

Can you remove the white/grey colour attributes from your text as it makes it nearly invisible when viewed with certain themes. Thanks.

I didn't tag anything white/gray I only tagged red or green text but maybe when those colors are used it adds tags for rest of text? I'll just remove all color...