RT-N66U - Firmware upgrade and flashing issues

[Dimitri-dib]

Hi all,

I have a Asus RT-N66U wireless router for two years now. Last night, I've tried to upgrade the firmware to the latest version in the Web GUI directly (downloading from internet and flashing in one step). Something didn't work and the router went dead. The power, the LAN and WAN leds were lit but no other.
I've followed all the processes that I found in the forum: factory reset, NVRAM flush, Recovery Mode + Firmware Restoration Utility, Recovery Mode + Firmware upload through CFE mini webserver.
I tried several stock FW versions (the ones I found in the Asus downloads website) and latest Merlin build. Waited for 15, 30, 60 min and even left the device there for all night.

In the end, I managed to flash the latest Tomato AIO FW. But no others are working. Maybe this is due to the size of this FW (~12MB) being smaller than the others (~25MB).

Anyone with similar problems? Any thoughts on the reason for the issues?

 

[hggomes]

That doesn't make any sense, if you were able to flash Tomato FW you should be able to flash others FW's aswell.

In the past people that were complaining about it was because they didn't wait enough for reboot.

 

[RMerlin]

Flashing through the mini web server on the RT-N66U can take a long time - up to 40 mins for some people. Chances are, that Tomato firmware was much smaller, so you waited long enough for it to properly complete.