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Restore Fonera firmware after DDWRT v24final upgrade

And now, “another brick in the wall” of the Fonera posts! After some days of testing and Googling, I’ve figured out that a working implementation of the Fon capabilities on a Fonera running DDWRT doesn’t exist. Sometimes Chillispot is broken, sometimes the Heartbeat function doesn’t work, and so on.

So I wanted to restore the original firmware, but the tutorial on the DDWRT wiki doesn’t work, since it does not take into account the recent modification in the boot script introduced after the v24 RC7. If you apply the old recovery, your La Fonera will boot only once, then at the next reboot it will not start, because of the modified boot file created in the DDWRT flashing.

So, if you’ve flashed your La Fonera (only 2100 Foneras) with the most recent version of DDWRT (v24 RC7, v24 final, …) and want to return to the original FON Firmware, you have to:

• Download the original 0.7.1.1 firmware, already patched for this kind of flashing
• Go to the RedBoot prompt
• Give the following commands:

ip_address -l 192.168.1.254/24 -h 192.168.1.2
fis init
load -r -v -b 0x80040450 rootfs.squashfs
fis create -b 0x80040450 -f 0xA8030000 -l 0x00700000 -e 0x00000000 rootfs
load -r -b %{FREEMEMLO} kernel.lzma
fis create -r 0x80041000 -e 0x80041000 vmlinux.bin.l7

• Consider that some commands can take up to 20 minutes to be executed, so DO NOT disconnect your Fonera. After this, you have to use the fconfig command, and set the boot parameters according to these ones:

RedBoot> fconfig
Run script at boot: true
Boot script:
.. fis load -l linux
.. exec
Enter script, terminate with empty line
>> fis load -l vmlinux.bin.l7
>> exec
>>
Boot script timeout (1000ms resolution): 10
Use BOOTP for network configuration: false
Gateway IP address:
Local IP address: 192.168.1.254
Local IP address mask: 255.255.255.0
Default server IP address:
Console baud rate: 9600
GDB connection port: 9000
Force console for special debug messages: false
Network debug at boot time: false
Update RedBoot non-volatile configuration - continue (y/n)? y
... Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
... Program from 0x80ff0000-0x81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

• To end the flashing process, type:

fis load -l vmlinux.bin.l7
exec

Your Fonera will reboot and in a couple of seconds you will have your original Fon firmware.

Tags: boot, ddwrt, final, firmware, fonera, original, restore, v24