How to recover a Linksys WRT54GL router that has a blinking green power LED and no response from the web interface?

Question

I was flashing the router with the Tomato firmware, but something went wrong; I'm not sure what. Now, the router responds to ping at 192.168.1.1 (my Mac's on a static IP 192.168.1.21), but the web-interface doesn't come up.

I have read that this situation is recoverable in a [couple of places][2], but I haven't been having much success and so I wondered whether anyone could help.

From my Mac (OSX 10.5) I have tried to tftp a new vanilla-Linksys firmware to the router and reboot; according to the trace, this sends it but the router behaves no differently after a reboot.

I've read that if boot_wait is turned on, I'll have an easier time, but I haven't been able to find any instructions that tell me how I can tell whether I did this or not (I don't think I have, but I might have, when I tinkered the first time months ago - the router has worked since then, though).

I have found a couple of references to [something called JTAG][3], which seems like some kind of [homebrew diagnostic cable thing][4], but that's a little beyond my ken. Happy to try it, with muppet-level instructions, though (I do software, not hardware!).

So, I'm at a bit of a loss, really, and wondered whether anyone could provide me with the route (ha. ha.) out of this mess?

Hm, I can't post all the links I wanted to until I have some more reputation.

Solution

Have you tried failsafe mode. http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/openwrtdocs/hardware/linksys/wrt54gl

Check your arp cache. I found the openwrt pages useful for a similar problem.

Also note references to problems with the power supply. Everything seems ok but system doesn't come up. I swapped in an old power supply temporarily until I could order a new one.

Comments

[Peter Mounce]

Tried that; no joy.

[Peter Mounce]

How do I go about doing that?

[Michael]

This is the first solution I would recommend -- a "hard reset". If this doesn't work

[Ben Voigt]

@KronoS: No, JTAG would be used if the router bootloader got corrupted. If you can telnet, the bootloader's ok, and JTAG isn't needed.

[Piskvor left the building]

Good point about the power supply - I've had an Asus WL500gP fail to boot, and it looked just like a bad flash. In the end, turned out that the wall wart couldn't give whole 2000 mA at boot (the power draw is considerably lower once the boot sequence finishes). Replacing it fixed the problem.