[Ez2kal]

I recently purchased an R8000 router ( made in Vietnam with stock firmware V1.0.4.28_10.1.54 ) . I wanted to use Kong' latest firmware for R8000 router ( the last one). So starting with kong's CHK file , right off the bat I got the error, "incompatible firmware". After some research, i learned, Netgear routers with recent firmwares installed, they do not let the user dow‌ngrade ( an idea to prevent user unknowingly downgrade to less secure firmware!), that was when I realized ( through a tip on a different forum) that I have to use a chk file with a built version 41xxx and upward. since Kong's latest chk firmware was 40xxx , would not work. So I found the latest R8000 dd-wrt chk and bin file ( dated July 2020). Then I could easily install the CHK through netgear webpage ( without error) , and later the bin file through dd-wrt webpage. Until here everything was great. But the next problem was, with the new bin file installed, I had a very touchy and unstable dd-wrt firmware, so any changes i made, as soon as I pressed the SAVE button, it would crash and get disconnected and I had to reboot every single time.I did 30-30-30 reboot and anything else and did not work and that was when I realized the BIN file ( the latest firmware is buggy ), so I decided this time update ( or downgrade)to Kong' BIN file, but the current dd-wrt was very very touchy and as soon as I would hit the upgrade it would get disconnected again and couldnt even update the firmware. So I changed from chrome to internet explorer and rebooted the router, and got connected through internet explorer and tried the upgrade one last time and this time successfully installed Kong's bin file. And everything is working perfectly now.

So to put it in a nutshell,

1- get CHK file from here: ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2020/07-23-2020-r43904/netgear-r8000/factory-to-dd-wrt.chk

2- get KONG's BIN file from here: http://ddwrt-kong.clonevince.fr/40270/dd-wrt.v24-K3_AC_ARM_R8000.bin

3- now simply use the chk file to upgrade to minimal dd-wrt from your stock firmware, then use the bin file to upgrade from the minimal dd-wrt to a full version ( Kong firmware)




That's it.

[Per Yngve Berg]

You can use this

https://download1.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/betas/2020/06-25-2020-r43516/netgear-r8000/


Reported OK on R8000.

The only difference between chk and bin is the header, so the chk file is accepted by the stock fw. There is no full and minmal version.

Kong has quit developing for dd-wrt, so his builds are getting outdated.

[Ez2kal]