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Topic: how to flash openwrt to older version

The content of this topic has been archived on 26 Mar 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

i have a tp-link archer c7. i decided to do a full factory reinstall using the reboot/press wps/reset button and tftping the file up with the latest (30th Dec 2014) trunk

https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots … actory.bin

everything went well. except this version i have doesn't appear to work (can't seem to change the mac address for my wan, wireless appears broken etc.). what i would like to do is to downgrade the unit /back/ to BB.

so i tried the reboot/reset to tftp again... but it doesn't seem to work; i've tried 192.168.1.66 and 192.168.0.66 (as per the docs) and it just doesn't bite.

so, i know i can sysupgrade /up/ versions, can i do the same going down?

or would i be better served with mtd'ing:

$ mtd -r write /tmp/openwrt-ar71xx-blah-squashfs-factory.bin firmware

cheers,

Yes, you can flash older sysupgrade images to downgrade.

thanks hnyman,

do you know if the mtd would work as well? i don't really care to keep any configs, and i suppose doing a sysupgrade won't help as all my config files won't work anyway (eg with wifi).

sysupgrade is just a wrapper around mtd.
And sysupgrade contains option -n to delete config.

i think i'm being rather dense here... just wanna be sure in case i brick my router:

sysupgrade's typically require the sysupgrade.bin
full images (to install openwrt from the vendor sw) use the factory.bin

1) if i downgrade using sysupgrade, should i be using the sysupgrade.bin or the factory.bin?
2) if i downgrade using mtd, should i be using the sysupgrade.bin or the factory.bin?

cheers,

You use sysupgrade.bin when flashing a live Openwrt system. Both with mtd and with "sysupgrade" (which is a wrapper script around mtd...)

"factory.img" usually just contains an extra header so that the firmware matches the ID required by the OEM vendor flashing code. Otherwise it is usually identical to the sysupgrade version. So factory.img is needed only when flashing a router still running the OEM vendor software, or when the flashing is done using OEM recovery mode (TFTP etc.).

(Last edited by hnyman on 30 Dec 2014, 10:00)

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