How to recover a crashed OpenWRT Router

Plan B if your beloved OpenWRT Router won’t boot:

Installing a fresh image using TFTP

1. Unplug the power to your router
2. Connect via a Switch (!) - Otherwise your network card will go offline and it won’t work
2. Give your machine a 192.168.0/24 IP-Address (e.g. 192.168.1.2)
3. Start your tftp client
4. Give it the router's address (usually 192.168.1.1)
5. Set mode to octet/binary.
6. Tell the client to resend the file, until it succeeds.
7. Put the file.
8. Plug your router, while having the tftp client running and constantly probing for a connection
9. The tftp client will receive an ack from the bootloader and starts sending the firmware

Linux and OS X:

$ tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> binary
tftp> rexmt 1
tftp> timeout 60
tftp> trace
tftp> put openwrt-wrt54gs-squashfs.bin - For me the TRX file didn’t work using tftp

Windows:

tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT openwrt-wrt54gs-squashfs.bin

More info:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/generic.flashing.tftp

nb : dandies