I bought an RT-AX68U new, liked it, decided to get another to replace my AC68 when I could find a good deal. A "used/acceptable condition" listing came up on Amazon. I don't care about cosmetics, so I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, it appeared to be in perfect shape physically, but I couldn't connect to it . Whether wired or wireless, it would not provide an IP address. Windows indicated packets sent, but no packets received from the router. I therefore couldn't even get into the router's setup, and resets didn't seem to do anything. So I put the router in rescue mode and used the Asus restoration tool to flash the latest Asus bios on there. THAT was successful. It defaults to an IP address of 192.168.50.1, which I thought was odd because I would expect it to be 192.168.1.1, but other than that, it seemed to operate properly. I then decided to load the latest Merlin beta on it. That installed without issue. Then I decided to perform a factory reset, just as a best practice, particularly after the strange set of events. But it never really seems to perform the factory reset: powering up while holding down the WPS button causes the LAN light to come on first, then the power light, then it just continues to boot up as though the WPS button isn't being pressed. After that, it was back to where it was when I first got it: it wouldn't communicate with my PC. Several repeated attempts of a factory reset resulted in the same thing... it would just boot up. So this time I decided to try just the standard reset of holding the reset button down while powered up. THAT works. So now it's up and running on Merlin, seemingly with no issues.
So my question is: has anyone else had this issue of the standard hard factory reset not working, and actually making the router inoperable? Any clue what might cause this? Holding down WPS while powering up is the method listed on the Asus site for this model, but it is a new model. Perhaps that's not right for this model? I have the other AX68U that I bought new that I could test with, but frankly after the PITA it was to get this one going, I'm not anxious to start TRYING to cause issues on one that has never had any issues (I do have Merlin on that router too, but I've never attempted a reset on it). I'm just trying to figure out if this could be indicative of something wrong with this router that someone else obviously returned. With the exception of not accepting the standard hard factory reset, it's operating normally, and was a good price.
So my question is: has anyone else had this issue of the standard hard factory reset not working, and actually making the router inoperable? Any clue what might cause this? Holding down WPS while powering up is the method listed on the Asus site for this model, but it is a new model. Perhaps that's not right for this model? I have the other AX68U that I bought new that I could test with, but frankly after the PITA it was to get this one going, I'm not anxious to start TRYING to cause issues on one that has never had any issues (I do have Merlin on that router too, but I've never attempted a reset on it). I'm just trying to figure out if this could be indicative of something wrong with this router that someone else obviously returned. With the exception of not accepting the standard hard factory reset, it's operating normally, and was a good price.
