Recovering a Netgear Router using a serial cable.

[Statica]

Hey folks:
Sorry abt the delay but thought I'd put up a Howto to recover your Netgear and the like in case of a bad firmware/configuration update (as mine did).

What you need:

A serial cable male-female, sold sometimes as a serial mouse extension cable

A free serial port on your computer, connected to say COM1

A downloaded version of a working firmware, currently for me that happens to be 3.24 available from the netgear site, unzipped to a known location, the two files of importance being: 314v324.bin and romfile0.311

A modem/serial terminal program like hyperterminal

about half an hour of ur time

What you do is.
1. create a Hyperterminal session with the router (com1 for an example) and bits per second is 9600.
2. Once the hyperterminal session is created and you are CONNECTED unplug the power from the router for a few seconds and repower the router.
3. Now you will notice the sequence of events occuring on the hyperterminal display, like ROM check etc. When prompted, hit any key to continue into debug mode.
4. Now type atur
This will say something like uploading or working followed by CCCC... but in actuality nothing happens.
5. So click straight to Transfer > send file, choose to use xmodem for the protocol, navigate to the 314v324.bin file that you unzipped from the firmware file. This could take a while (remember 9600 bps)
7. When done type in atur3 and do the same thing by going to transfer > send file and then using xmodem and this time pointing it to the rom file romfile0.311. This takes a bit too.
8. Once this is done, type in atgo to restart
the router.
9. Now the password has been reset back to '1234' and the IP address for the
router has been set to '192.168.0.1' and it is set back to factory defaults.


HTH