[deadeye09]

I've been struggling for days to try to get DDWRT on an EA6200 router that I have. I thought that it would be as simple as flashing it with the available DDWRT firmware, but every time the router came back up, it just had the stock Linksys firmware.

I did some searching and found these instructions that seemed to work for the fellow that wrote them, but wouldn't work for me:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/linksys-ea6200-dd-wrt/

I found some notes in this forum that stated that, in order to stop the original firmware from popping over to the other partition and load the default firmware, you need to run these commands when the DDWRT UI first loads:
image_writer ddr_wrt_fw_to_flash.trx /dev/mtd2
nvram set bootpartition=0
nvram commit
reboot

Unfortunately, I can't get the DDWRT firmware to even load once to run those commands.

I found these instructions that claimed to be the one way that will absolutely get the router re-flashed:
https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=177498&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=135

I got as far as editing the xvortex bin file, but I was unable to ssh into the router (disabled by default perhaps? But I couldn't see any way to enable it through the default UI).

I've tried flashing back to the base 1.1.41.188556 firmware several times, then using asus_rt-ac56u-firmware.trx just to get DDWRT on there (as it's supposed to fix the default firmware from loading), but nothing seems to work for me. I'm at my wits end on this problem and would appreciate any advice.
Thanks.