3. Purchase Serial - Full-Featured Terminal Emulator from the MacOS App Store for $29.99
4. Power off the Netgear R7000 and attach a Thunderbolt / USB-C Ethernet adapter and Ethernet patch cord to the MacBook Pro and attach the other end of the Ethernet patch cord to a LAN port on the Netgear R7000.
5. Remove all six female pins from plastic housing of the Ftdi - TTL-232r-3v3 - USB to Serial Converter Cable, 3.3v, 6pin one at a time by lifting each plastic slat up with a steel pick and sliding out each female pin.
6. Using the Ftdi - TTL-232r-3v3 data sheet at https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/Cables/DS_TTL-232R_CABLES.pdf, on page 9, as well as the R7000 motherboard picture attached herein, insert in the six pin empty plastic housing of the Ftdi - TTL-232r-3v3 - USB to Serial Converter Cable, 3.3v, 6pin the following pins from right to left: the TX (orange) wire pin into position 1 of the plastic housing, the RX (yellow) wire pin into position 2 of the plastic housing, and the GND (black) wire pin into position 3 of the plastic housing. Wrap each of the three remaining loose pins individually in electrical tape to avoid shorting.
7. Open up the Netgear R7000 case to expose the motherboard. There are 5 screws of three different types on the bottom plastic plate of the case: 2 are black and long, 2 are chrome and long, and one is black and short. The 4 long screws are under the four rubber foot pads and the 5th screw is in the center. Remember where each screw type goes! Separate the case and view the motherboard as per the motherboard photo attached. You will see a row of 4 header pins labeled as J252. The three pins of interest are are from right to left TX, RX, and GND. Attach the newly rearranged plastic connector to match the header pins on the motherboard.
8. Using System Preferences, define the MacBook Pro's USB Ethernet adapter to configure its IPv4 manually, with its IP address to be: 192.168.1.44, Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0, and Router: 192.168.1.1
9. Launch the Serial Terminal Emulator on the MacBook Pro and configure it to use the Ftdi - TTL-232r-3v3 for 115200-8-N-1. Launch Terminal on the MacBook Pro, cd to the directory that contains the factory-to-dd-wrt.chk firmware image you want to upload.
10. Into the copy/paste buffer on the MacBook Pro, copy the following list of commands:
Code:
tftp
connect 192.168.1.1
binary
rexmt 1
timeout 180
put factory-to-dd-wrt.chk
11. Shrink or close all windows except Terminal and Serial and position both to be visible on the screen. Click on the Serial window so typing is directed to that window.
12. Power up the Netgear R7000 and immediately start submitting ^Cs repeatedly to Serial until a CFE> prompt comes up.
13. When you see the CFE> prompt in the Serial window, type in tftpd into the window and return. The router hardware will start flashing a LED signaling it is ready for a tftp upload. Afterward move focus to the Terminal window and paste in the commands in item 10 that you copied earlier.
14. Wait until you see that the firmware upload was successful (about 90 seconds) and then wait for the router to fully reboot (another 150 seconds).
15. Using a browser set to 192.168.1.1 on the MacBook Pro, log into the Netgear R7000 router web configuration page. First change the userid and password, then go to Administration, Factory Defaults and click "Yes" on Restore Factory Defaults and "Apply Settings". Wait until router fully reboots again. Using System Preferences, define the MacBook Pro's USB Ethernet adapter so that IPv4 is configured to use DHCP. Using a browser set to 192.168.1.1 on the MacBook Pro, log into the Netgear R7000 router web configuration page. First change the userid and password and then continue configuring the router for general use.
R7000 Motherboard-1.jpg
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Last edited by mache on Wed Jan 15, 2020 22:54; edited 4 times in total
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 14208 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2020 18:40 Post subject:
You could insert "How-To:" at the beginning of the subject line. You can also use CoolTerm free instead of spending $30 on an app. Just one of several options:
Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 10:26 Post subject: Thanks and query
Thanks for this tips, that allowed me to know I could tftp from OSX cli natively
My gifted EX6200 with official Netgear is now buggy, sometimes boot fine (once and I could see Genie wizard), other time serial rapidly show "decompress error 1" and by chance sometime if I hit Ctrl+C fast enough, decompress is DONE, going further up to IP setup is 192.168.1.250
put I still can't ping the machine neither tftp to it.
anyone has encountered this, do I need another thread for this case ?
