Necropost warning....
So, digging around in a box of old routers (setting up a switch/access point as an extender, looking for an appropriate one to try), I put my hands on the DIR-655 and couldn't understand why it wasn't working. I vaguely recalled having a bricked router, but I'd forgotten all the troubleshooting. I re-invented the wheel, until my search found my own posts on this thread from almost 10 years ago....
This router is pretty old, this is obviously only a playing-around hobbyist type issue at this point--but, I wonder, was this ever solved?? I'm exactly where I was at the time of the previous posts: the router will show me the emergency recovery page, but it will either ignore all attempts to send it an image, or respond with "incorrect hardware ID image."
The only thing I tried that I did not do before was tftp--which 100% comes back with "connection attempt failed"....
So... anyone ever end up getting a bricked DIR-655 resurrected?