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Tuesday 1 March 2011

Change of plans?

Had a tiny bit more progress on the zoom, managed to dump the firmware, and now I've been able to distinguish the header and checksums, all the info will be documented in a wiki once working.

Also another ebay bargin an Edimax NS-1500N, this listed on their site as a wireless NAS but has an RT3050.

This thing is tiny! its like 1/2 the size of the zoom. its listed as having 4MB flash on the edimax site but Amazingly it seems to have 8MB of flash inside :O so I'll be moving focus to that.

2 comments:

  1. Hi!

    I have an old version (one of the first) of Zalip router and I can't flash it to newer firmware. Is there any chance, you could tell me, how did you manage to connect to router with putty and how did you manage to dump FW from router (and how to see the correct header of FW).

    I allready tried TFTP. I can put the router in TFTP mode (power it of, hold down the reset button and then power it back on. After 10-15s the status led starts to flash irregularly -> the router is in TFTP mode), then send a file on router (command in windows is: tftp -i "routeIP" PUT "path+filename of .BIN file"... The transfer is successful, but after restart, there is still old GUI and FW on it.

    I know that level one WBR 6800 has better support (for 3g modems -> i have ZTE MF100 that is not supported in current FW that is on my router, but Level One FW for WBR 6800 has support for my dongle), so i would like to flash this zalip with Level Ones FirmWare.



    Thank you for your answer and sorry for my bad english.



    Regards,

    Jure Kocen

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  2. Hi Jure, Thanks for reading my blog, your English is perfect!

    I assume your router is a CDW530AM?

    I use putty to connect to the internal serial interface of the router.

    I managed to dump the firmware by accident, I was experimenting with firmwares and managed to corrupt part of the flash with the web control panel, this stopped it from being mounted so I had a method of getting files out the router via the web server. Using dd I backed up all of the mtd partitions, unfortunately this wont back up headers.


    The firmware has multiple "headers" for each partition(kernel, etc) they have a manufacturer ID, this stops flashing alternate manufacturers firmware.
    the headers include other information like where this partition should be programmed to flash and crc32.

    from what I've noticed when trying to update firmware even if the header doesn't match what it expects it will still transfer but discard instead.

    I've not tried this yet but you could compare the headers with the zalip and level one firmware and change accordingly.

    The one thing I did notice is some firmware include updates to the boot loader which if you're not careful you could destroy the device.

    As your device doesn't even accept the zalip firmware I suggest soldering the serial interface to see why its not being programmed.

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