Restore factory firmware, did I goof up?
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2021 4:34 pm
I picked up my first DMR radio, a DM-1801 and discovered pretty quickly that scan was broken. I suspect now it was because of loading 2.1.9 codeplug on 2.2.5 firmware, but that's a problem for another day. I found forums saying 2.2.5 was buggy, jumped to a conclusion, and went in search of OpenGD77. Found a video, installed it, and decided I didn't like the loss of being able to program my own keys and decided to restore. Without RTFM. Needless to say I ended up with a "low bt version" and was pretty sure I'd bricked the radio. Nothing would talk to it anymore and after 5 panicked hours I hit the rack. Well, this morning I rebooted my computer and low and behold I was able to push OpenGD77 back to it, and it's booting fine. I'd like to be able to say I followed the instructions that said "Backup flash, eprom etc immediately after installing OpenGD77" but I cant.
As soon as I was able to reinstall OpenGD77, I backed up the flash, eprom, mcurom and calibration, but I have no idea if the files are any good given they were not taken "Immediately after installing" the first time. And quite frankly I'm a bit gun-shy now about doing a restore wrong and permanently bricking this thing. I'm a network engineer/server admin in the real world, rolling patches back and forth and same with server firmware is secondhand, but I've never bricked a server doing it. This was a real eye-opener. It's only a $59 radio, but that's a lot of cups of coffee if I need to buy a new one.
I've seen a few threads where people have successfully rolled back to factory firmware but I haven't been able to decipher the actual order of things. What I do know so far is:
1) I need to use the Baofeng firmware updater to restore 2.2.5
2) The flash and eprom need to be restored either before, after, or at the same time as the 2.2.5 firmware
3) At some point the radio needs to be in flash mode
4) At some point the radio needs to be power cycled.
5) With the radio in flash mode, I don't seem to have a com port pointing to it.
Can anyone who's managed to do this give me some direction of how all this research fits together?
Thank you in advance,
Steve
As soon as I was able to reinstall OpenGD77, I backed up the flash, eprom, mcurom and calibration, but I have no idea if the files are any good given they were not taken "Immediately after installing" the first time. And quite frankly I'm a bit gun-shy now about doing a restore wrong and permanently bricking this thing. I'm a network engineer/server admin in the real world, rolling patches back and forth and same with server firmware is secondhand, but I've never bricked a server doing it. This was a real eye-opener. It's only a $59 radio, but that's a lot of cups of coffee if I need to buy a new one.
I've seen a few threads where people have successfully rolled back to factory firmware but I haven't been able to decipher the actual order of things. What I do know so far is:
1) I need to use the Baofeng firmware updater to restore 2.2.5
2) The flash and eprom need to be restored either before, after, or at the same time as the 2.2.5 firmware
3) At some point the radio needs to be in flash mode
4) At some point the radio needs to be power cycled.
5) With the radio in flash mode, I don't seem to have a com port pointing to it.
Can anyone who's managed to do this give me some direction of how all this research fits together?
Thank you in advance,
Steve