If Your Fritzbox Bootloader Doesnt Respond

 

So this is just a very small post that I wanted to make because… why not.

I recently tried to flash freetz-ng onto my FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7240, but corrupted my firmware in the process. I tried to recover using the AVM recovery tool, but it just didn’t pick the box up.

What ended up happening, as i’ve later realized, is that the bootloader’s environment variables got messed up.

The Solution

I just needed to reset the variable to the correct value. I connected to the box over UART and ran printenv to get the current vars.

For those wondering, the baudrate is 38400 baud.

This gave me the following list:

HWRevision            144
ProductID             Fritz_Box_7240
SerialNumber          0000000000000000
annex                 B
autoload              yes
bootloaderVersion     1.484
bootserport           tty0
cpufrequency          360000000
firstfreeaddress      0x946BD89C
firmware_info         73.06.06
firmware_version      1und1,1
flashsize             0x01000000
jffs2_size            16
maca                  [REDACTED]
macb                  [REDACTED]
macwlan               [REDACTED]
macdsl                [REDACTED]
memsize               0x04000000
modetty0              38400,n,8,1,hw
modetty1              38400,n,8,1,hw
mtd0                  0x90000000,0x90000000
mtd1                  0x90020000,0x90F80000
mtd2                  0x90000000,0x90020000
mtd3                  0x90F80000,0x90FC0000
mtd4                  0x90FC0000,0x91000000
my_ipaddress          192.168.1.1
prompt                Eva_AVM
provider              
ptest                 
req_fullrate_freq     120000000
sysfrequency          120000000
urlader-version       1484
usb_board_mac         [REDACTED]
usb_device_id         0x0000
usb_device_name       USB DSL Device
usb_manufacturer_name  AVM
usb_revision_id       0x0000
usb_rndis_mac         [REDACTED]
wlan_key              [REDACTED]

The problem was the value my_ipaddress, which was set to 192.168.1.1. This is standard on most routers, but on AVM routers, the standard it 192.168.178.1

I’m not entirely sure what set the variable to that, but to fix it I just had to run this:

setenv my_ipaddress 192.168.178.1

And yeah, that fixed my issue of not being to reflash the router. Thanks for reading this little post!