Long story short and being new to these, via serial in Uboot I chose erase not thinking it would wipe the boot-loader. Not sure what I was wanting that to accomplish but I'm here now, no turning back.

So far I have desoldered the flash chip and connected it to my RPI and have successfully identified the chip with flashrom. I found some stock bin files and padded it to the correct size until flashrom was happy, 4mb instead of 3.8.

I soldered some wires from the board to the chip to test boot and it did not boot. So either the wires are too long, about 5in, the flash failed or the flash in not in the correct spot on the chip. This is where I'm lost and not sure where to go from here. I DO NOT have a stock backup or this would probably be a lot easier.

Could I only flash Uboot just to get it to boot? Any advice would be great!

Thank you in advance.

Five inch wires should not be a problem.  Of course they have to be wired correctly.

The Uboot bootloader goes in the first 128k of the chip.  You have to have a bootloader, OpenWrt does not boot by itself. OpenWrt does not contain a bootloader, it expects it to be in the flash chip all along.  I think you can download TP-Link stock firmware with "boot" in the name, and remove the header (512 bytes?) and use the next 128k of the file as your bootloader image.

At offset 0x020000 (128k boundary) put an OpenWrt or LEDE "sysupgrade" bin file.  The ART data goes in the last 64k of the chip.  Only a few hundred bytes in the ART are not 0xFF, but they are essential for the wifi to work.  Hopefully you did not erase that.  The gap between the end of the firmware bin and the ART will be automatically formatted with the jffs2 filesystem during the first boot.

While you have the flash chip unsoldered would be an excellent opportunity to switch to a larger one.  OpenWrt will detect the chip size and use the larger space without changing any software.

(Last edited by mk24 on 23 Sep 2017, 02:25)

The bin files I tried were what I believed to be stock TP link files. Flashrom has also done a couple erases on the chip as well so its probably nuked of data.

Iv googled around a lot for someones flash dump of the chip but have yet to find any. I figured that would be the best route, then i could but a custom uboot on and fix the mac address and flash WRT from there.

What started all this, I got this for a few dollars at goodwill, turned out it was an airenabler modded router for AirPlay and i could not establish a static IP with the router that i could use to flash files over. So not even sure if the stock flash would have allowed it to act as a router depending how they installed it.

So an update, I used my raspberry pi to flash the web-enabled uboot after i padded the file and then connected the chip to the board. Well it booted up!! I then flashed over serial openwrt and can access it through 192.168.1.1 no problem. The new problem, I have no wifi settings, i assume this is due to me nuking the ART partition. Any advice on how to get this back?