I have a DIR-655, hardware A4, which is completely unresponsive. I don't know how it happened because I got it after it was already broken. When I plug the power in, the blue power LED comes on and stays on solid. It never blinks. If I plug an Ethernet cable into port 1 (or any of the others), the corresponding blue LED on the front will light up and blink when there is traffic, but the router itself is unresponsive.
I tried all sorts of troubleshooting. I tried different combinations of resetting it by holding down the reset button before, during, or after unplugging and plugging in the power. I also tried several times the corrupt firmware recovery procedure in the sticky post "Firmware updates and DLink routers".
I have used a PC connected directly to port 1 (and tried other ports) with a statically assigned IP of 192.168.0.2/255.255.255.0. I also tried some others I believe. I would try to ping or web browse to 192.168.0.1 but never got anything. Trying without a static IP, I also got no DHCP response.
I searched the web to see if I could locate the serial port but there was no information for this specific model. Nonetheless I probed some of the unpopulated ports on the circuit board but found nothing.
Everything on the board looks OK. There do not appear to be any loose or burnt components, nor any bulging capacitors. Voltages are what you would expect - 12 V from the adapter and 3.3 V on some chips in various places where you'd expect to see that. The 3.3 V is very stable, too, so I doubt any power supply issues.
So I tried reprogramming the Spansion FL032A flash ROM directly. I used the program SPIPGM and instructions similar to these:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/generic.debrick. (Note: I am just providing the link for reference to the re-flashing information; I am not trying to run any type of firmware other than the actual D-Link firmware.)
I could successfully read and write to the chip. I took two backup copies of the original chip contents and compared them. They were identical. Next I erased the chip and verified that it had been erased. I downloaded the firmware file from the D-Link website, version 1.35NA. I unzipped the file and wrote it into the chip directly. I verified that the data was written correctly, but the router behaved the same as before.
I suspected the firmware file (dir655_FW_135NA.bin) might be compressed. Indeed, I tried to open the firmware .bin file in 7-zip and it did in fact open. It contains a single file in some deeply nested subdirectories: cygdrive\c\Ubicom\sdk\projects\dir-655\build\bin\img.bin. I thought maybe I could burn this image into the chip but I was a little worried because the file was too big (4.6 MB) for the flash chip (4 MB). I tried it anyway but it did not work.
So, here is what I am wondering...
If I were to want to rewrite the flash chip directly, how can I do it? The original image is compressed, and if you unzip that "image" the image inside it is too big for the chip. So I am guessing that when the firmware is uploaded to the router using the normal web interface it does some sort of processing to pick out the pieces it needs and put them in the proper memory locations. Just theorizing. But I have no way to do that manually.
Could someone tell me if reprogramming the chip directly is at all possible and, if so, how? Or if you have any other troubleshooting suggestions in this situation I would appreciate that as well. Thank you.
Author
Topic: Directly reprogramming flash chip (Read 5822 times)