Upgrading Belkin F5D7231-4 v2000 router to dd-wrt firmware
Posted by Admin • Monday, November 23. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks
As the dd-wrt hardware database claims that this router is supported, I was happy to attempt this installation. Only the micro edition will fit on its tiny 2MB of flash. The dd-wrt page suggests that only tftp flash procedure will work, and so I grabbed their tftp.exe - to no avail. This router seems to have a lot of upgrading threads dedicated to it, but most of the How-To's I was able to find did not work for me. Some said that in order to get the firmware to load on this device you need to catch the perfect second during its reset cycle where the ping TTL's (you have to ping it) are 100, and launch the tftp upload at that exact time. I was never able to achieve any part of this.
Fortunately after nearly giving up I found this thread which offers alternate (windows only) utility called "Sercomm" to load an alternate (I'm honestly not sure where it came from) .bin image onto the router - I can only assume that it's the dd-wrt image converted to sercomm format. The image you get from dd-wrt will not work with this loader. I loaded this yesterday (2009/11/22) and got the latest (dd-wrt v24 SP2) on my router, and it even works great (so far).
That said, there is one caveat to the instructions provided in the Readme.txt file: I first loaded the dd-wrt image (two are provided: dd-wrt and original Belkin), and the router failed to reboot or respond. I then loaded the Belkin image, it worked correctly as per instructions. Then I was able to load the dd-wrt image successfully. Naturally the IP address changed to 192.168.1.1 instead of 192.168.2.1
