WZR-HP-300NH: Defective By Design?

[SanityKills]

   

I ordered my first WZR-HP-300NH from Amazon which came with latest firmware.  Worked for a week, tweaked some NAS settings remotely, rebooted and the router never connected again to the ISP.  After several tries, router eventually bricked and kept power cycling indefinitely.

 

I ordered my 2nd one from NewEgg which came with the older, original firmware.  Updated to latest firmware, configured it, ran into the ISP connection issue (again), unplugged cable, ran auto connect, errored, plugged cable back in, got connected to ISP, went down for a reboot before saving configuration--router never came back up.  Bricked with diag light blinking twice--doesn't reboot, doesn't do anything except flash the diag light. Sending both to retailers tomorrow.  One for my money back, one for an exchange.  I INSIST on returning them until I get a good one since it does appear that some are functional since, I assume, people are using theirs.  Coming from LinkSys products I find it very peculiar that I've gotten two bad ones from two separate retailers from apparently different "batches".

 

While I'm waiting for the 3rd one to come in--this has been a matter of a several week ordeal--is there a way to get these stable or is it just the luck of the draw?  Should I stay on original firmware unless I run into problems?  Should I just give up on the idea and move on to another product?  I REALLY want to make this work but I'm losing $10 at NewEgg every time I do a return... not to mention the week or so in between doing RMA's.

 

 

 

[MasterBob]

   

You can manually unbrick the router using TFTP if you so desire.

 

See this post over on the DD-WRT forum on instructions on how to do it using Win 7. They also go over doing that using an Ubuntu LiveCD in that same thread.

 

Are you using DSL or Cable?

 

Are there any features you need in 1.72? If not, stick with 1.65 if it works.

[SanityKills]

   

"You can manually unbrick the router using TFTP if you so desire."

 

Tried.  Didn't work.  When TFTP'ing from Ubuntu the router would show that it was up for about a second then just keep recycling.  Didn't bother on the 2nd one since I'd only had it for a few hours and wasn't about to attempt to stabilize an obviously defective router.

 

"Are you using DSL or Cable?"

 

Cable.  DHCP.

 

"Are there any features you need in 1.72? If not, stick with 1.65 if it works."

 

I'm not sure. I automatically updated since I'd read a lot of complaints about the older firmware so I figured I'd skip the bugs right off the bat.

 

I'm not very confident that my 3rd Buffalo will arrive in much better shape so I bought an Asus RT-N16 to play with while I'm awaiting RMA's.  Since the Buffalo was exactly what I wanted, if it would work, I'm not too thrilled about having to move to a second best option but we'll see how it goes with the 3rd one when it comes in I guess.  If the 3rd one comes in defective I'll either consider myself one of the unluckiest people I know, that all of these models are defective by design, or that there is something so significant about my configuration that only non-Buffalo routers are capable of handling my particular setup (i.e., router > modem > ISP).

[cdhinch]

   

SanityKills wrote:

"You can manually unbrick the router using TFTP if you so desire."

 

Tried.  Didn't work.  When TFTP'ing from Ubuntu the router would show that it was up for about a second then just keep recycling.  Didn't bother on the 2nd one since I'd only had it for a few hours and wasn't about to attempt to stabilize an obviously defective router.

 

Did you set a static ARP association in Ubuntu for the router?  Also, did you set a static IP in Ubuntu?  You have to do both of those things before you can TFTP a firmware to the router.