AX86U after fw upgrade: The Country Code is not exist! Please enter Country Code.

[attila75]

Dear all,

I face the above problem... I have an AX86U.
I did find two similar threads, but my router was bought by me, and worked well (more on that in a second!), until I upgraded from 386.3_2 to 3004.388.5.

A bit longer story:
I noticed, that the router could not mount my HDDs (4 of them are attached through a powered USB 3.0 hub. It has been working so for years without problems). Also, I could not SSH into the router. None were crucial problems, I cannot tell when these services stopped to work, maybe in the last few weeks, maybe months.
I thought I might have been hacked, or something went wrong in the settings, so I tried to reset the router, but it did not work. Simply no effect. The settings remained.
Then I tried to upgrade the firmware from the web GUI.
No effect. Uploaded the image, the progress bar went from 0 to 100, and after a reboot, the same FW version, and the same settings were in effect. I remember tho have this problem before, but about a year or so ago I had no problems with the router, just wanted to upgrade.

Now comes the messy part, because I tried to use the Asus restoration tool. And it always said that the router was not in recovery mode. It actually could not even connect. The tool even tried WIFI, even though this is a desktop PC with no WIFI adapter in it.
I tried to erase NVRAM (not even once), turned the router on and off multiple times, and tried to enter recovery mode several more times. To no avail.

Until I have found out, that the Asus tool tried to upload the fw through my Virtualbox adapter. I simply disabled it, and it worked!
(Might worth to note, because I have searched for hours and have seen no similar problem)

Firmware uploaded, settings restored, and dang, ever since I have this problem.
My WIFI stopped working.

I flashed 386.3_2 back, and now the GUI says that 2.4GHz works, but no device can see it.

I tried these two lines:

cat /proc/mtd
ubiattach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 10

And it didn't give any errors, so I hope the situation is not completely hopeless!

We are at home, both me and my girlfriend have covid, and now we cannot use the internet...

I am stuck, and desperately need help!

Thank you in advance!
Attila

 

[OzarkEdge]

Dear all,

I face the above problem... I have an AX86U.
I did find two similar threads, but my router was bought by me, and worked well (more on that in a second!), until I upgraded from 386.3_2 to 3004.388.5.

A bit longer story:
I noticed, that the router could not mount my HDDs (4 of them are attached through a powered USB 3.0 hub. It has been working so for years without problems). Also, I could not SSH into the router. None were crucial problems, I cannot tell when these services stopped to work, maybe in the last few weeks, maybe months.
I thought I might have been hacked, or something went wrong in the settings, so I tried to reset the router, but it did not work. Simply no effect. The settings remained.
Then I tried to upgrade the firmware from the web GUI.
No effect. Uploaded the image, the progress bar went from 0 to 100, and after a reboot, the same FW version, and the same settings were in effect. I remember tho have this problem before, but about a year or so ago I had no problems with the router, just wanted to upgrade.

Now comes the messy part, because I tried to use the Asus restoration tool. And it always said that the router was not in recovery mode. It actually could not even connect. The tool even tried WIFI, even though this is a desktop PC with no WIFI adapter in it.
I tried to erase NVRAM (not even once), turned the router on and off multiple times, and tried to enter recovery mode several more times. To no avail.

Until I have found out, that the Asus tool tried to upload the fw through my Virtualbox adapter. I simply disabled it, and it worked!
(Might worth to note, because I have searched for hours and have seen no similar problem)

Firmware uploaded, settings restored, and dang, ever since I have this problem.
My WIFI stopped working.

I flashed 386.3_2 back, and now the GUI says that 2.4GHz works, but no device can see it.

I tried these two lines:

cat /proc/mtd
ubiattach /dev/ubi_ctrl -m 10

And it didn't give any errors, so I hope the situation is not completely hopeless!

We are at home, both me and my girlfriend have covid, and now we cannot use the internet...

I am stuck, and desperately need help!

Thank you in advance!
Attila

I gather that firmware upload can fail when available memory is not adequate. Did you try disconnecting the router from everything but your admin PC and then reboot to cleanup the router/RAM before trying to upload firmware? Also, it sounds like you restored old settings to new firmware... perhaps another source of trouble.

Me, I would try to recommission the router from scratch to get it working... disconnect everything from it, especially all of that external storage, Reset and cycle power, install the desired/correct firmware, Hard Reset that firmware to its default settings, and then configure it minimally from scratch to see if it comes up working. If working, then finish configuration from scratch.

FW Reset FAQ

Reset button/webUI Restore/node removal - clears settings in NVRAM; reboot restores fw defaults from CFE

Hard Reset via WPS button/webUI Restore+Initialize - also clears data logged in /jffs partition

OE

 

[attila75]

I gather that firmware upload can fail when available memory is not adequate. Did you try disconnecting the router from everything but your admin PC and then reboot to cleanup the router/RAM before trying to upload firmware? Also, it sounds like you restored old settings to new firmware... perhaps another source of trouble.

Me, I would try to recommission the router from scratch to get it working... disconnect everything from it, especially all of that external storage, Reset and cycle power, install the desired/correct firmware, Hard Reset that firmware to its default settings, and then configure it minimally from scratch to see if it comes up working. If working, then finish configuration from scratch.

FW Reset FAQ

Reset button/webUI Restore/node removal - clears settings in NVRAM; reboot restores fw defaults from CFE

Hard Reset via WPS button/webUI Restore+Initialize - also clears data logged in /jffs partition

OE

Dear OzarkEdge,

Many thanks for the tips!
I did try all of these - to no avail. Unfortunately the problem persisted...

The router is under warranty (according to Asus's automatic check, but haven't yet gotten confirmation from them), but I'd like to iron it out with some help from this forum

Many thanks,
Attila

 

[bbunge]

Try flashing the Asus firmware for the router after a reset with initialize all settings from the GUI. Sometimes the AX86U will not clean all settings with a hard factory reset.

 

[attila75]

Try flashing the Asus firmware for the router after a reset with initialize all settings from the GUI. Sometimes the AX86U will not clean all settings with a hard factory reset.

Thanks!
I'm not sure, but I may have tried this variation too. I will give it a try though.

On the other hand, I think that somehow the contents of the NVRAM have changed (were erased maybe somehow?), and I am not sure that a reflash will write these back. But really just guessing here, I may as well be wrong.

Thanks for the tip!

 

[Tech9]

See this:

Solved - RT-AX86U dead WiFi asking for country code?

Hey everyone So a friend of mine bought an used RT-AX86U and asked me to take a look at it because the wifi led are not lighting up and the SSIDs wont show up. Installing merlinWRT didn't fix it either. Looking at the wifi settings opens a popup asking for a country code and the channels are...

www.snbforums.com

 

[attila75]

Thanks for the pointer! Yes, we did exchange a few messages with ColinTaylor too.

I also grab the chance to tell that it turned out that the calibration data of my router was somehow lost.
I did make a backup of my settings before he whole procedure, but somehow that backup was corrupted (maybe a sign of other, maybe related problems I mentioned above), and so that some important data could not be rescued.
He could have get those data from a different device, but as I got to know, all these devices are factory calibrated, and this data differ for each individual router. Would have maybe been "close enough" but no one knows what possible problems it would have caused on the long run.

He suggested, and I also thought so, that since my router is still well in its warranty period, it would make more sense to RMA it, than to bring it back to life, with data that is off. That way the device would have worked, so no RMA could have been done.

The take home message is maybe that take multiple backups!

Thanks for everyone!

 

[fennng]

I had exactly the same issue. Started from a similar reason. One day, I noticed that I could not ssh my router any more. No matter how I set the ssh configs. Then I tried to update the firmware, the strange thing then happened. No matter how many times I tried, the firmware keep unchanged. I tried with different firmware, didn't make any difference. So I end up with restoring the firmware using the restoring tool. The firmware was successfully flashed in. But it took very long time to reboot. I flashed a few different firmwares and thought that my router was dead. But when I was downloading another firmware, the router's internet led finally turned red. The booting doesn't look right. When the router was turned on, the power led lit up. Then the LAN port start blinking and my PC was assign correct IP though DHCP. But the Lan port led suddenly turned off, left the power led solely on. Then after quite a few minutes later, the internet led would turn red.

So, i can login my router finally, but the WIFI stop working. I got the same message:

The Country Code is not exist! Please enter Country Code.

I tried a few different firmwares, some firmware show the wifi icon totally gray, some will show half gray and half green. But even with the half green, my phone cannot see any wifi available. And the wifi led never turned on.

I have searched on the internet for the whole day. Could find much useful information. It seems ColinTaylor is the only person who has fixed this problem before.