Buffalo WBMR-HP-G300H How to recover from bricking

How to recover from bricking by saffo

The router bootloader has a tftp client, which will try to connect to 192.168.11.2 and load a file called firmware.ram.

1. Build ramdisk image. These images have uImage in their name, but you can't take the one which you get a during normal build or download. You have to setup a buildroot environment and configure it to build a ramdisk image (make menuconfig –> Target Images –> ramdisk). 

Here's my (rename the file) firmware.ram

And here is my latest trunk build as a backup r33530 (there is no dsl_control bug which is present in r34168)

2. Install and start a tftp server. For linux there is a package called tftpd-hpa and on MacOS X TftpServer Version 3.4.1 was used. If you use Windows, you can use this free tftp-server tftpd32

3. Copy the firmware.ram into the root directory of your tftp server (e.g. /srv/tftp or /var/lib/tftp or your current directory depending on your software)

4. Setup your interface. It doesn't matter which port of the router you use. Set your IP to 192.168.11.2/24. 

5. Push the AOSS button and power on the router. Keep the AOSS button for about 5 seconds pushed. When the AOSS button is pushed the LED below power will also light up on start. You can verify with wireshark, if everything works as expected. There should be a tftp request from 192.168.11.1 to 192.168.11.2 for a file firmware.ram. Then This file will be transmitted and after that the ip 192.168.11.1 vanishs, because you see your computer asking to whom this ip belongs.

6. Wait. If you have wifi configured in your image you see wifi come up after a while. Another way is to ping 192.168.1.1 or the ip you have configured in your image. You may also do a DHCP request, which will be answered if your router booted fine. My router did not give any signal via LED if it is ready or not. Also during normal operation no LED is on, except for the one in the LAN ports.

7. Flash a working image. Now you have access again, but keep in mind, that this image is not flashed and only runs in ram. Flash a clean image via your preferred way. You can do this with the webinterface or ssh/telnet and sysupgrade.

I suggest you to use Wireshark during the entire process.

Remember to change the IP for your NIC to 192.168.1.XXX or use DHCP! The firmware.ram do not use 192.168.11.0/24

This is what I did once to recover from a brick(I don't really think it really was, but something went wrong). This is NOT entirely written by me but partially edited from the official openwrt wiki Buffalo WBMR OpenWrt Wiki