Help - ASUS XT8 - Wrong FW flashed - Rescue not available - CFE OK

[fleckens]

Hi all

I'm hoping someone can help me please...

I have an ASUS router that looks like someone (not me) has flashed it with an incorrect FW. The symptoms are solid white which turns to solid green and stays like that.

I've opened it up and plugged in a serial RS232 to the board and compared the output with a known good board. This confirms my suspiscion of wrong flash, see attached image for a side by side comparison.

Pressing the reset button will reset the device but not enter into rescue by holding it down, the light will not turn purple.

Long pressing WPS button press at power didn't help either, but it does get me to a CFE command prompt .

Seems like it dosen't get far enough to start the network stack and it's not visible to the PC running recovery.


If I just let it boot normally I only see these errors repeating over and over once it finished booting and settled down.

MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 24

As I have a CFE command line and can interact with it. Is it possible to upload a nand flash this way?

Thank you.

 

[fleckens]

OK.... I got impatient and unsoldered a known good NAND from a donor XT8 which is dead and replaced the one in mine. All good I thought, work looks clean, no shorts and each pin inspected for good physical connection.

I now get the white light turning to blinking green as expected but then it boot loops. The serial out shows lots of repeated MDIO errors and then it reboots/loops.

MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
etc.

Now I have no issues to get it into rescue using the long press reset at power on and flash the latest official XT8 FW, all completed succesfully. But MDIO problem persists.

After some investigation I've found the donor NAND has the MAC addresses of the hardware from the donor router and these no longer match my routrer, how can I change this? I think this is could be cause of my MDIO issues. I think MDIO uses MAC address in communications

 

[fleckens]

Update... managed to change the MAC address using the CFE command line option "b" to set board parameters, the MAC address is now correct but still have the MDIO issue. I'm starting to lean towards the idea that this router has an underlying hardware issue and someone thought they'd flash the firmware to fix it, and in the process made it worse by loading the wrong FW. Now that it has the right FW it's a lot better as rescue mode is fine, but I'm now probably faced with the original issue.

All output on the serial port looks fine until it tries "Detecting PHYs"

Broadcom Archer Packet Accelerator Intializing
Open archer Netdevice
Archer DS DPI Initialized
Archer US DPI Initialized
Archer WLAN Interface Construct (Threshold 32 packets, Timeout 500 usec, Jiffies 10)
Sysport 0 WOL IRQ 53
Sysport 1 WOL IRQ 59
Archer WLAN Rx Thread Initialized
SYSPORT Driver Constructed (Budget: 128, Coalescing: 826828 nsec)
Archer Mode set to L2+L3
Archer Mode set to L2+L3
Initialized Archer Host Layer
Flow Table (256, 64): e167b000, 4194304 bytes
Flow Info Table (44, 65536): e1a7c000, 2883584 bytes
Command List Table (128): virt 0xd6400000, phys 0x16400000, size 2097152 bytes
Command List Control Table (8): d6ac0000, 131072 bytes
Sysport Classifier Initialized: Maximum 16384 flows
Archer IQ status changed from 0 to 1
[NTC bitpool] idx_pool_init: 551:FHW[0]:Create Index Pool_Size = 16384
Retrieve num_fhw_path=64
Pathstats allocated 2048 bytes
Broadcom Packet Flow Cache HW acceleration enabled.
Enabled Archer binding to Flow Cache
Broadcom Archer Network Processor Char Driver v0.1 Registered <339>
Archer TCP Pure ACK Enabled
crossbar Mux: connect cb_idx:0 int_ep 0 to ext_ep 2
crossbar Mux: connect cb_idx:0 int_ep 1 to ext_ep -1

Detecting PHYs...
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31

Loading firmware into detected PHYs...

Adjusted SF2 SGPHY: sphy_ctrl=0x0001081b
getrcal for res select 5, int 667, ext 638, ratio 122 ratio1 152, rcal 9
Setting SGMII Calibration value to 0x9
PLL_PON(8051): 0x0250; TX_PON(8067): 0x0048; RX_PON(80b2): 0x0980
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31
MDIO Error: MDIO got failure status on phy 31


Any thoughts anyone?