Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2022 17:58 Post subject: Netgear 6300 bricked by CPU speed
I have a Netgear r6300 where someone playing with it set the CPU speed too high. I am unable to reset that setting with a hard reset, and am wondering what the next step is.
As near as I can tell, the router was working OK, but the user thought they would try to get higher performance with it, and bumped the speed beyond the processor limit.
You might want to ignore everything I wrote below, until someone more knowledgeable posts an easy solution.
Doesn't it have to get past the firmware reset loop to set CPU speed, so that if a reset doesn't work, it seems like hardware damage?
In other *computers* I would wonder about instability causing filesystem corruption but I seem to recall someone stating it is a read-only filesystem so shouldn't have that potential.
Is it not booting at all? Processors are generally more stable at lower temperature (per same voltage) so I wonder if sealing it in an air-tight ziplock food bag, freezing it, then leaving it practically sealed (just enough room to get power and ethernet cable in or use wifi) so condensation doesn't form, would allow running at the higher speed temporarily to boot and set back to stock speed.
One source showed stock speed is 600MHz, what was it set to?
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14221 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 19:45 Post subject:
The cpu/ram frequencies have been b0rked. I doubt putting it in TFTP mode/recovery mode or using nmrpflash will work 100%, but serial would be the obvious next option if neither of those worked.
Regarding the proper settings, it depends on if it is a v1, v2, etc:
You might be thinking of a different device. The R6300v2 is shown correctly with Broadcom BCM4708A0 (800 MHz, 2 cores). I ran several of them until I updated HW this past year. One of them ran for about 5 years OC'd to 1200mhz with a fan on the back. I tried going higher early on. I don't remember the exact steps, as it was several years ago now, but I was able to recover it with a serial connection. _________________ Current devices:
XR500 - gateway
5x R7500v2 - AP
OpenMediaVault server for tailscale, SMB, & Emby
