Procedure to restore the factory firmware on a TL-WR810N v1 rotuer (restoring from openWRT or dd-wrt)

TFTP factory reset TP-Link TL-WR820N V1.md

1. Download the factory binary link (download page)
   • consider downloading from the tp link page associated with your country, as directed on the page
   • the download linked to by the openWRT wiki did not work for me
2. Extract the .bin file from the zip and rename it: wr810nv1_tp_recovery.bin
3. On Ubuntu (verified on 18.10) install tftpd-hpa: sudo apt install tftpd-hpa
4. Create the default tftp directory: /var/lib/tftpboot
5. Move wr810nv1_tp_recovery.bin to /var/lib/tftpboot
6. In the gnome network manager, set the IPv4 address to manual, 192.168.0.66 with mask 255.255.255.0
7. Connect an ethernet cable between the computer and the WAN/LAN port of the router
8. Restart the tftp daemon to be sure: sudo systemctl restart tftpd-hpa.service
9. Monitor the logs of tftpd: journalctl --unit=tftpd-hpa.service -f (note: the -f flag starts monitoring the journal for new logs messages)
   • You should see that tftpd was successfully started in the previous step
10. Start the TFTP download sequence:
    1. Unplug the router
    2. Press the "Reset/WPA" button and continue holding it while plugging in the router
    3. Continue holding the "Reset/WPA" button until you see the tftpd service starts downloading the file, for me this took >50 seconds!
    4. Once the message RRQ from 192.168.0.86 filename wr810nv1_tp_recovery.bin is observed in the logs (associated with the activity light on the network plug flashing), letrelease the "Reset/WPA" button
11. Wait for the flashing to complete, obvserved by a router restarting (the LED of the router flashing and eventually becoming solid)
12. Verify everything is fine by:
    1. restting the gnom network settings to automatic
    2. Unplug the ethernet cable from the router, wait 10 seconds, and plug it into the LAN port of the router
    3. Navigate to http://192.168.0.1

Thank you for the instructions. Even though the device was de-bricked successfully, I curiously did not see logs of any activity. The way I figured the flashing was successful is by noticing the router's lights.

Updates Pop os (ubuntu) 20.04

I need to update this gist because as noted above, there are now some issues:

1. The default directory for the tftpd server is no longer /var/lib/tftpboot. It is now /srv/tftp. This can be observed in the config in /etc/default/tftpd-hpa. Either change the value in the config or change the directory in the directions
2. As noted above, there is no output when flashing 😢 . Maybe adding the -v or even -vvv options to the config file will enable that level of logging.

After putting the files in /srv/tftp, it "just worked" ©️, but without any indication in the logs...