Only the 5ghz bands are operational. I’ve upgraded successfully to various versions of dd wrt with the lan, wan, and 2.4ghz bands remaining nonfunctional. The unit will not enter rescue mode either. I believe the cfe is partially corrupted, and default values set in nvram have been cleared from the device.
Does anyone know how I could safely flash back to the stock firmware without rescue mode or where I might find default nvram settings to check against?
Are you running the Asus firmware or DD-WRT?
Can you access the WebUI with a wired connection?
Dd wrt firmware.
I can only connect on the 5ghz band. lan ports are nonoperational.
And you said holding the WPS button on powering on the router does not put it in rescue mode?
You can try downloading the firmware from Asus, rename it from .trx to .bin ( After extracting it, I think it’s usually zipped. ) and try to flash it using the DD-WRT WebUI. At least that is what they recommend at the DD-WRT forum.
I’ve personally only used Asuswrt-Merlin on my RT-AC5300, so I don’t know a whole lot about DD-WRT on that router.
There are reports of the router having issues with the radios and people having to RMA the router. If you manage to get the Asus firmware flashed and are still having radio issues it may be a hardware thing, and not the firmware.
Yeah, I think it’s an issue with nvram settings being lost from the manufacturer. If Asus would only publish those I could just input it manually.
Installing the stock firmware through the DD-WRT GUI won’t kill the router?
I did notice the mac address printed on the bottom of the router is not showing up. By any chance, you would not happen to know which mac address that is supposed to be out of LAN, WAN, and Wireless?
AFAIK you can flash stock from DDWRT no problem. I run merlin these days though so 
It should flash no problem, at least that is what the DD-WRT folks say.
I believe it is the WAN MAC that is shown on the bottom of the router, but the other MAC addresses are usually very similar.
If you need any nvram stuff I may be able to get it from my RT-AC5300.
hmm, Asus only has the most recent firmwares available. I’m a little hesitant to try those, as I’ve read the newest firmwares lock out third party firmwares.
Oh that would be awesome. If I can get the file I can diff the files. Of course, after you removed any security sensitive values.
Okay, I think it’s easier for me to factory reset my router, reset nvram, then dump it that way there isn’t any sensitive data.
You should theoretically be able to just flash it to your router.
Give me a little bit to get it dumped and uploaded somewhere, I’ll have to wait until late tonight when nobody at the house is using the internet so I can take the network down for a little.
thanks.
Here it is, I hope it is of some use to you.
( I hope the link is allowed. )
https://mega.nz/#!tQsXSYbT!JUjPZTl-u6hhiEe3Lj7G-EKNYLQJTD0-kht-3yXAUnc
The gt and rt are very complex routers in their own, i have the gt and had some issues initially but found the best way to rectify it was downloading the current firmware and installing it through safemode. I was trying to make a web caching device with it by tossing ddwrt on it and provisioning it to mirtor all web traffic to hard disk, i ended up partially vricking it with only the 5ghz gaming band operational. I thought i screwed up a 300 dollar router dernit.
Yeah, only put dd wrt on it for the faster in network transfer speeds. Merlin probably does the job now a days. You can make a pretty nice media server / backup NAS with it for relatively cheap.
Yeah, I can’t enter rescue mode for some reason anymore, and flashing stock through dd wrt gui will not work. Last time I used rescue mode it took me hours to actually get in. Oh, maybe scripting a longer boot wait time period might help.
Is it safe to write the stock firmware by logging in through ssh and writing to disk?
@duncanyoyo1 Thanks.
You can write the firmware over SSH, if you know how to set up the partitions and everything properly. But it is not recommended. Since you had DD-WRT you need to flash a firmware as a ‘transition’ step that defines a 64M rootfs but still fits in a 32M rootfs space. But that doesn’t exist so it will have to be hacked together. Source
When you put the device in recovery mode, there is only a small window of time you have to TFTP the firmware to the router otherwise you have to reboot it and try again. Some times it takes me 10’s of tries to get it to connect. And since you flashed DD-WRT you may or may not get a flashing power light, so don’t even bother looking for that.
I have seen several RT-AC5300 where the 2.4 GHz simply died. RMA might be in order.
Looks like I have to go in by serial. Trying to fix the damn thing I messed up the network arrangement.
I can try to rma it, but when Asus checks the device the wireless will pop up as dd wrt they’ll most likely deny the claim. However, if I open up the unit and flash back to stock I void the warranty for sure. If there’s any hardware damage I’m completely screwed.
As far as, multimeters go is this model decent? I just want to get one that is not easy to blow up by being careless, and not a pain to work with. I need one anyways for more accurate voltage readings of overclocks.