I have a Linksys WRT1900ACSv2 router that until recently was running nearly 3 year old DD-WRT firmware. Last night I made the dubious decision to upgrade and picked what I thought at the time was the latest version, r62104 from last month. That flashed successfully but my Internet speed was reduced to a rate so slow it was unusable. The fastest result I could get from fast.com was 26Mbps and my ISP's speedtest wouldn't even finish.
When attempting to reflash r51506, which I had been using until that point, it kept failing. I then flashed the stock firmware and my speed returned to normal. At this point I decided I would try OpenWRT, but the webgui was very unfamiliar and I didn't feel like manually reconfiguring everything when I had a backup of my DD-WRT config I could restore. I have a lot of configuration going on.
I flashed stock firmware back onto the router and then, since a lot of people here seem to have speed issues with versions higher than r59045,I decided to try that. I downloaded the factory-to-ddwrt image for that version and flashed it. It flashed successfully, but my webgui ended up looking like this.
At first I thought I had bricked my router, but another post here complaining about a broken webgui reminded me that my router has a second firmware partition, so I followed the procedure to boot it into the second partition and was able to recover my router.
After making sure that both partitions had stock firmware, I then tried flashing r59045 again, only to end up with the webgui resembling the above again. Giving up on r59045, I reflashed stock firmware and attempted the factory to DDWRT image for r58950 since someone in the comments of that thread specifically stated having no issues with a Linksys WRT1900ACSv2. However, this also ended up with the webgui looking like my above image.
Does anyone know what is going on here? Can anyone suggest a factory to DDWRT image that actually works for my router? I'm currently running stock firmware right now.
EDIT: I have now also tried r61848 and again my webgui resembles my above posted image. Something is very wrong here. Is it my browser? I'm just using Firefox...
Okay. That should be easy enough. However, it begs the question why factory to DD-WRT builds are offered for newer builds when they clearly don't work and this is not made more obvious when trying to flash from stock firmware. I'm at work now and will not have a chance to try this until afternoon tomorrow. I will definitely try it then.
Also, that link states that backups from one version are not recommended to be restored to a later version. Is that really a big deal? My backup from the three year old firmware seemed to restore just fine when I was running last month's build.
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 13883 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2025 5:50 Post subject:
Deadsayer wrote:
Also, that link states that backups from one version are not recommended to be restored to a later version. Is that really a big deal? My backup from the three year old firmware seemed to restore just fine when I was running last month's build.
You think it runs fine until you hit some strange and spurious problems.
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 13883 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2025 5:53 Post subject:
Deadsayer wrote:
Okay. That should be easy enough. However, it begs the question why factory to DD-WRT builds are offered for newer builds when they clearly don't work and this is not made more obvious when trying to flash from stock firmware. I'm at work now and will not have a chance to try this until afternoon tomorrow. I will definitely try it then.
What everybody should read and it is in all forums are the forum guidelines with helpful pointers about how to research your router, where and what firmware to download, where and how to post and many other helpful tips:
https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=324087
Quote:
12. Before uploading a new build to your router, research the build by looking in the build threads.
That still doesn't explain why there are factory to DD-WRT builds for new versions when it is documented that they don't work and it's not recommended to use them. Why even bother making them? Instead of including them with each build, why not include the older version and a note that flashing from factory firmware requires the older version first right on the download page to make it more obvious? Or just make that the factory to DD-WRT build to use before any other version? The way this site is laid out really makes no sense and it's very counter intuitive.
Well, I think I've done it this time. I tried flashing that 2018 build and the webgui is still messed up, just as in my posted image with the exception that there are three boxes to type in and a change password button. And now I can't get back to stock firmware. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to boot the alternate partition and I keep getting the messed up webgui at 192.168.1.1 instead of the Linksys webgui at 10.215.10.133.
Is there any way to salvage this? It flashes over the inactive partition and then boots to that, right? I should still have stock firmware on one of them.Trying to ssh into the router just says connection refused.
Thanks. I finally managed to get back to stock firmware though. I guess I just wasn't letting the router boot up long enough before turning it off again.
I don't think changing the password would have helped anyway. The firmware clearly was messed up. I don't know why this isn't working. You're supposed to use that r34411 build from 2018 but it's not working either.
This is getting very frustrating. I might just have to go with OpenWRT after all. I'm really not looking forward to reconfiguring everything.
I've pretty much settled on OpenWRT at this point, but I will keep that in mind if I decide I really don't like the OpenWRT webgui. I might even flash the alternate partition on my router with DD-WRT again to see if a clean browser makes a difference.
