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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually someone will come along and want\/need the old, outdated thing you have.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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I stumbled upon the right search phrase and voila, here we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n