Recovering broken firmware

During my tests I accidently broke my device. I did a stupid thing, kind of rm -rf / ;-) After restarting, router entered into boot-loop state... This section describes how to recover / files from the original firmware.

Preparing firmware for flashing

Download the latest firmware from TP-Link web site. Extract it. The firmware file is a .bin one - in my example it's "Archer C2300(EU)_V1_171121.bin". But it's not ready to be flash directly if you don't have web interface running. We need to prepare the proper firmware file. We'll use binwalk tool to extract the firmware.

binwalk -e "Archer C2300(EU)_V1_171121.bin" 

DECIMAL       HEXADECIMAL     DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5239          0x1477          JFFS2 filesystem, little endian
3544183       0x361477        UBI erase count header, version: 1, EC: 0x0, VID header offset: 0x800, data offset: 0x1000

We'll use the first extracted file, bigger one - 1477.jffs2 in this case

Flashing extracted firmware

• connect serial adapter to your router and reboot
• during startup, press space quickly to enter CFE menu
• using your cable-connected PC, go to http://192.168.1.1
• select the prepared firmware file (1477.jffs2 in the example above) and click to flash

The router reboots automatically and has the / partition restored. You will have your config remained (as it's retrieved from nvram). You'll also have files in /data and /tp_data, as these are different partitions.