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Bricked E2500 Cisco Wireless Router – Fixed!

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My old wireless router had started having trouble and the wireless chipset was beginning to get flaky.  I’d been running DD-WRT on it for about a year and a half without any problems, but lately it started having issues only with wireless connections.  Being the cheapskate I am, I ordered a refurb E2500 Cisco from Amazon for under $40 and in a few days it showed up in the mail.  I had already looked up the router in the DD-WRT router database and pulled down the mini firmware in order to overwrite the stock firmware.  (Unfortunately, what I would later read in the forum posts is that the firmware version dd-wrt.v24-18625_NEWD-2_K2.6_mini-e2500.bin would basically brick the router.)  So do yourself a favor and use the 18710 version right off the bat  (dd-wrt.v24-18710_NEWD-2_K2.6_std_usb_nas-e2500.bin).

Even though I had properly followed the 30-30-30 power cycling procedure and updated the firmware with the one recommended in the router database, my router was caught in a continuous reboot cycle.  Every so often I could ping the router for a little while and if I timed it right, I could successfully TFTP up the original stock firmware, however after manually power cycling, it would go back to it’s constant reboot cycle on its own.  Believe me, I worked on it for quite a few hours and then gave up on it.  Then as luck would have it a few days later, I read a post that someone had left it unplugged for a day and the router no longer went through the automatic reboot and stayed solid, but they couldn’t get to the GUI DD-WRT interface.  I had the same results, and left the router unplugged for two days, and when I tired was able to telnet to the router and fix it using these steps:

Telnetting to the E2500 router
I had to set my laptop’s NIC card manually first to 192.168.1.100/24 and then was able to telnet to the router at 192.168.1.1

Then, as you can see above, I performed an “erase linux” and “erase nvram” and then power cycled the router.   At this point I could get to the Management Mode Firmware Upgrade Utility by going to http://192.168.1.1

Firmware upgrade management interface - cisco E2500
Thank goodness for the firmware upgrade management interface – cisco E2500

Now believe me, I really thought hard about loading up the stock firmware, but hey, I might as well try DD-WRT again.  Using the management interface I uploaded  newer fixed version of the DDWRT firmware (version 18625).

Of course waiting during the firmware upload is the worst part
Of course waiting during the firmware upload is the worst part for me. I’ve spent too many sleepless hours back in the day waiting around for hours while uploading images to old cisco routers over xmodem protocols to enjoy this sort of thing anymore.

Luckily this time the firmware took and after a single *yay* power-cycle, I was presented with the standard, change your password page for DD-WRT!

Yay! The default change your user and password page for DD-WRT
Yay! The default change your user and password page for DD-WRT

Then all I had to do was go thought and put back in all my settings… and enjoy my new router with much better working wireless.