I’d been given an older Netgear wireless DSL/Cable router years ago. This included the box, which was nice, because I planned to sell it for $dollars$ and it usually presents nicer when you have things like that. I naturally forgot about it until it was unearthed months ago. I listed it and waited, as one does.
Eventually someone will come along and want/need the old, outdated thing you have. Or so my experience has taught me. I recently sold a pair of AirPort Extreme routers for OK money, but have also sold other 802.11n routers in the recent past which no one should use.
The WNR2000 isn’t special. It’s one of the upstanding type, so maybe that’s unusual, but it’s a black rectangle with lights on it, so pretty standard in that way. This is the v4, which isn’t important unless you find yourself in the situation I did.
When I was alerted that it had sold, for $dollars$ I figured that it was a good idea to power it on and check to see if I’d reset it. What I was greeted with was a flashing amber light after a few moments. This seemed to be a bad thing, and the NETGEAR%% wireless network that was listed on the back wasn’t showing, nor were the lights on the front that would indicate that wireless or WPS were working. Oh boy.
I seem to have recalled booting it up and trying to update the firmware, but that’s not to be trusted. Maybe this is why I was given the router? Honestly, that didn’t matter. I’d prefer to sell a useful item rather than alert the person who had paid for it that a refund was in order. Some time could be devoted to this, and I am not uncomfortable in these situations when there is a solution to find.
Lots of searches and a few videos later, I was pretty sure that Netgear had a solution. I found that this was either a power issue or corrupted firmware. I was using the beefy 12V 1.0A Netgear adapter that it came with, so that wasn’t it. So, how do I fix this firmware thing? Well, Netgear didn’t make it easy, and as anyone who has ever done any firmware hacking with routers knows: versions matter.
I found an insightful video detailing how to use an old protocol to transfer the firmware to the router using TFTP. I hadn’t used this in a very long time, since the days in school of sending files to Cisco routers. I was pleased to see that usable TFTP programs existed, so I could at least skip the command-line syntax minefield. What was frustrating , however, is that Netgear didn’t seem to make this easy. Sure, the firmware was right there, including many older versions back to the one it shipped with. However, instructions were not clear.
Then I stumbled upon the right search phrase and voila, here we go.
The instructions are pretty clear, except for one step, but otherwise I was pleased at the result. I followed the steps here to send the latest firmware file to the N300 WNR2000v4 and it’s back up and working:
The process is quick, if you make sure to not PUT before you should. I tried this, and then realized the directions wanted me to restart the router. After following those steps, PUT acted fast and the router restarted. After a few minutes I was greeted with a solid light, and then the wireless and WPS lights. I checked and found that the NETGEAR%% network was available. Going to 192.168.1.1 on the device connected to the router displayed the setup page. Just to be sure, I powered it off, waited, powered it back on and was relieved that it booted again.
Now it’s in the mail, headed to its new owner, thoroughly reset. I have a little more knowledge of how to do a recovery of this nature, and a new tool to try and remember.
