I upgraded a RB 532a from 2.9.50 to 3.1 ( Did not upgrade to 3.0 first)
At the time of update the board had 1 ethernet port enabled, the other 2 were disabled. It had two XR 5 cards in there, one of the WLAN's was disabled as well. This station had two radio's to act as a repeater, but then network topology changed so the other radio was disabled and left like that.

At the time of upgrade the the 532A was in Station WDS mode, with a bridge. The update uploaded, and rebooted, but never came back on ( Never connected wirelessly to the AP) I went to the location, connected via a local AP 2.4Ghz which was connected to Ether 1. I ran Winbox, scanned for RB boards, none found. Tried entering the IP manually of the device before upgrade, no connection.

I then tried to power cycle the 532A and the local AP ( Other device) as well. Tried to connect to it again via the local AP. Nothing again, the RB 532 never responded to pings, or connections via winbox.

I tried to use one of the other boards that I had that could see that site, on the XR5 ( before the one site was connected via WLAN to this problem site) and so I tried to SCAN, or use the align tool in winbox and nothing found with that other station.

I read a thread where on a 532A the WLAN devices may switch from one to the other, eg WLAN 1 becomes WLAN2, and WLAN 2 become WLAN1. I would expect to see it at least from the other station since the WLAN 2 that was disabled was facing the other site that I tested from, it just had been diabled, and that site connected direct to the AP. I would of expected one radio to be on.

I upgraded another RB 532A locally at my office here, and it updated fine, no problems. The only differences were that this one had only 1 radio, and was in AP mode.

Any Ideas? The problem board is quite hard to get to physically, otherwise I would of already tried to see if the link light was on, and or connected via serial.

I upgraded two other RB 112's one with a XR5 card, the other with a RB52H card, both in Station WDS with bridge, these upgraded fine, rebooted, and reconnected with no problems, but seemed to take a bit long, (10 minutes) then finnally reconnected.

Any help/ideas would be great.

One thing we noted sometimes was the following:
Upgrading systems with a bootloader (RouterBoot) lower than 2.8 did create the same symptom (systems don't come up again after upgrade). Ensuring to have at least RouterBoot 2.8 installed BEFORE the upgrade seems to do the trick.

As this is just our observation: Can anyone from MikroTik perhaps confirm this?

Does not come up Again? Do you mean, will not? or would I have to bring it down and update it via serial? Is the board dead?

In the cases I know what helped was upgrading RouterBoot via the serial port and the net-installing the boards again.
After that: everything fine again

I have seen problems upgrading RB532R5 to 3.1 5 times now. The message that comes up after a failed install (every RB532 upgrade I have tried so far) is:

"Kernal Panic - Not Syncing: No Init found. Try passing init= option to kernal."

I have seen the problem on bios 2.8 and 2.11

When I do a Net Install to upgrade I do not see the problem. I also managed to upgrade at least 1 RB532 (not R5) to 3RCx without problems (sorry I can't remember the exact version).

When I do a Net Install from 2.48 to 3.1 my configuration is blown away even though I ask the unit to use the old configuration. Is this normal?

Thanks,
Ken

FYI

I just tried 3.2 and it had the same problem.

Ken

I had upgraded the two RB 532A's. One crashed like that, and this other one is still up and running. I looked to see the firmware version, was 2.9 on this one. Unkown on the other one right now as its -25 and I don't want to go outside and climb to get it.

The one that is down was purchased about 4 months before the one that is still up.

Hi Mikrotik,

it´s time to add a warning to the release notes of 3.x.
Errors can happen, but not to warn Network admins
that an upgrade might kill there netwörk is not ok.
I´ve stations where I need to hire a climbing company
so a killed ap is no cheap fun and causes a lot of
angry customers.

Stefan

Its a very serious problem. We are effectively dead in the water regarding V3 until the 532 upgrade problem is fixed as we have so many 532s in the field.

We haven't found problems upgrading anything else, just 532s so far...

George

Just to confirm the last post, They are not accessible, as in they cannot be fixed? I can understand that they had a upgrade problem, but my understanding is that they can be fixed via a netinstall. Am I correct in assuming this? I still have not had a chance to get my hardware. I will be doing that on Monday and will update this thread when I try and fix it via netinstall.

Yes they can be fixed with a Net Install. However the labour costs to getting a broken unit down fixed then back up a 300' tower in a Canadian winter is rediculus. I suppose we should have tested them ourselves but I did about 10 RB133s and RB150s without problems before I nuked the RB532s. I didn't even know they were RB532s until my climber told me.

Ken

Hmm... loading V3 on a RB112 and you think MT has issues?

You need to make sure the 532's have 2.9.5 running on them before attempting the upgrade...

You need to make sure the 532's have 2.9.5 running on them before attempting the upgrade...

Only 2.9.5, or anything above 2.9.5? The units were all 2.9.48 with Boot Loader 2.11 that I upgraded and they still bombed.

Ken

2.9.5 or above. I did the same thing with radios running 2.9.46 and 2.9.48.

Seems to be some confusion here. Reading your post, it appears that you feel that a 112 is not suitable for V3, and that anything over 2.9.5 is a candidate for an upgrade to 3.x.

From where I sit, an RB112 is supported hardware and works just fine with V3.x, and despite the problem with the WLAN disappearing upgrade in the earlier RCs, upgrading a 112 works fine today.

Issues we have found with upgrades are limited to the 532 only, and, in addition, of course anything earlier than 2.9.38 is likely to be a license issue due to age of the license.

From our perspective, fix the 532 upgrade issue and RouterOS V3 is great. Please state your opinion clearly if you feel differently...

George

1. I have found v3 works iffy at best on the RB112 platform. You have to uninstall most packages and use it only as a CPE device for it to work reliably.

2. The RB532's typically crash with the kernel crash if you don't upgrade from 2.9.5+ to v3. In other words if you upgrade from 2.9.46 to v3 it will crash. Upgrade to 2.9.5x first then to v3 and you won't have a problem.

we need to know exactly what configuration you had before upgrade. What wireless cards, the configuration of the wireless cards (country settings,band,frequency,etc)?
What bios and RouterOS version you had before upgrade?
What packages were enabled and what file used for upgrade?
What revision of the boards you had?

AHh Finnaly got the thing down!

I copied this from Hyperterminal when the device first booted up....


RouterBOOT booter 2.8

RouterBoard 532A

CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand... OK
setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.


I then installed 3.2 right away via netinstall and its accesible now.

The configuration was as follows.
RB 532A that was running 2.9.50 then was upgraded to 3.1 ( Did not install 3.0 ever)
There was two Ubiquiti XR5 cards on this board.
At the time of upgrade, Ether 2, and Ether 3 were disabled. The wireless cad on the BACK side was disabled as well at the time of upgrade.

The 532A was configured as STATION wds, connected to an AP. ( upgrade was done over wireless) there was a bridge set up the way it is described in the Wiki for simple transparent bridge.
All other settigs were defaults that are set as defualts, other then using WPA, WPA2, and TKIP for security over the wireless.
Country was "Not Set", Antenna was not set, etc, all defualts, TX power was Default.

The board only had NTP Server running. Firewall, Rules, Queus were not set.

This was a very simple install.

The paste above was when the board was powered back on when it was on the desk.

On a side note: WHen I was using netinstall, I noticed that you can have boot to NAND then Ethernet. Just wondering, if I had it set to that option could I have just run netinstall on the ethernet side of the baord and would it of booted up? I noticed you had to hit enter a couple of times when it was booting to ether when I did it manually ( I think can't recall)

ANythign else you need to know?

ADDED: The link was in 5 Ghz Turbomode as well.

We suffered the exact problem, but with upgrading to v2.9.48 from v2.9.46. It took down the whole network, about 170 systems. Boards used were 112, 511, 532, 133. Had to connect to serial, boot of ether1 and do netinstall to repair. I have also checked and found that even systems (not every one though...?!) with bootloader 2.8 and above at times did not upgrade and the result : Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

It cost us lots of money to visit each client and high site and repair the damage.

Lesson: wait a few months before upgrading anything!!

We suffered the exact problem, but with upgrading to v2.9.48 from v2.9.46. It took down the whole network, about 170 systems. Boards used were 112, 511, 532, 133. Had to connect to serial, boot of ether1 and do netinstall to repair. I have also checked and found that even systems (not every one though...?!) with bootloader 2.8 and above at times did not upgrade and the result : Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

It cost us lots of money to visit each clientand high site and repair the damage.

Lesson: wait a few months before upgrading anything!!

Never *never* change a running system.
And never ever believe that a vendor warns about problems with his product.
Even now that there are multiple messages describing the same problem
there is no single line of warning in the release notes. So any customer
who do not follow this forum runs straight into this problem.

So please MT put a single line in the 3.x release notes:
"Warning: There are reported problems upgrading 1xx/5xx-Boards from Version 2.x to this
release. You may have to get physical access to the device and do a netinstall. We're fixing this in the release 3.3."

Think about the poor admins who have to handle such a bad situation.

Stefan

what software packages you had enabled in v2.9.50 and what packages you uploaded to upgrade the board?

The packages that were installed by default, and were enabled by default is what was running, with ONLY the exception of NTP server, I should actually correct what I said in my last post, as NTP CLIENT was also enabled and used time.windows.com for time updates, and the NTP server was running as well for other boards to get the time direct from there.

What ever packages are enabled by defualt was what was running. I at no time ever uploaded another package other then the " Combined Router OS" package This was for upgrades from what was originally on the board, 2.9.4 ( I think) then progrssivley up to 2.9.50. Then the combined 3.1 package, skipped 3.0, Didn't think this would matter in skipping 3.0 and going direct to 3.1

Do you need a serial number or Lot number off the board? it says RouterBOARD 500r5 I see some other numbers but not sure if they are important, and a smalls tamp with Q47 assuming Qaulity Control?

Glad I read this thread. Certain 'experts' (not on this forum) told me I was panicing, not the kernel. The only way I have seen to fix this is plug the serial cable in and set it to PXE boot and use netinstall. As previously posted, the Ethernet was up, link status on my switch good, even the MAC in the switch ARP table! No joy, no neighbors, even with our friend MAC telnet. (I didnt have below zero and snow for climbing the tower, but it was still up 700ft, 39 degrees with 30mph wind when it was 76 degrees two hours earlier, so it felt like Canada to me)
I was lucky and braved the upgrade the 'normal' way on a non-production unit, and remember saying to myself, I wonder if I should try this on a unit on the ground! Man was my hindsight cold.
I previously received 4 532A boards that every single one had the same kernel panic message. I think someone was 'helping' me by 'upgrading' to 3.x before sending it to me, and to help me get the shipment quicker, they never tested it again (not a distributor or any other vendor). I had not even seen 3.x yet, so I never even thought about it being an upgrade problem. I just wiped out the board, I recall doing a 'format NAND', but I never had to re-enter any keys that I recall. I forget if I ever forgot anything. Those boards worked with 2.9.x thereafter. The last panicing board I upgraded to 3.1, I just performed a 'reset', no format.
I still cant determine, by whats in this thread, if an RB112 will run 3.x. Something tells me dont do it because of another post I read. I have a perfectly working RB112 with fantastic throughput and reliability. I guess I should upgrade it now so we all know. Its on that same tower, but its not cold, just thunderstorms all around. Maybe I will just upgrade the 3.1 532 to 3.2

if somone could send us a RB532 which died with this upgrade problem:
"Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel."

Then please contact us at support@mikrotik.com to arrange this (we will pay you for the board).
We need to look physically at that board to find out the problem. We need the board which is not netinstalled after this upgrade failure.

HEY, you should of said that before I took it down and upgraded it...

Oh well.. I have the one that did die on my desk. Do you want me to install 2.9.50 via netinstall and then try the upgrade with the same wireless cards and same config as I had?

I don't know if it will be re-producable.. But I don't have a problem with helpin in this situation.

Might take a while for shipping from Canada though

HEY, you should of said that before I took it down and upgraded it...

Oh well.. I have the one that did die on my desk. Do you want me to install 2.9.50 via netinstall and then try the upgrade with the same wireless cards and same config as I had?

I don't know if it will be re-producable.. But I don't have a problem with helpin in this situation.

Might take a while for shipping from Canada though

I sent you an email.

Am struggling with the same problem on 2 x rb133c's, 1 x rb532A and one rb150.
Exept from one production rb133c that ran already 3.0 all other units were new purchased from MT and ran with 2.9.40 (rb150) or 2.9.49 (rb532A) or 3.0 (new rb133c)

All units on my desk now and none of these can be uploaded any packages from netinstall.
One rb133c is now completely unaccesible, only by console but since nand is empty and netboot can't run the board has nothing to boot from.

The other units can still be booted by netboot over the ethernet but uploading of files is impossible,
error message: FATAL ERROR Bad NetWork

The error message "Kernal Panic - Not Syncing: No Init found. Try passing init= option to kernal." only came up on the rb532A unit as far as I can recall. (And that's no sience! )

I have updated roughly 50 rb133c's, 12 rb112's, 1 rb532's 6 rb532A's and two brand new rb333's.
These units were running on a mix from relative new (ros2.4.47-49 or ros3.0) to old (ros 2.4.40) versions with most of the units still running 2.2 or 2.4 firmware.

In one big move to update all my MT stuff to the same ros and firware the result is that I now actually lost 4 boards out of approx. 70.

Am I happy? No
Is this a normal failure rate? I hope not.
Is there any solution to the problem? Haven't seen it yet. Think/Hope MT is working hard to tackle this problem.

rgds.

Rudy

Wireless RUDY!
Contact Uldis, He is looking for a baord(s) that is non accessible, DO NOT try to Netinstall after the failure. I beleive they want to see the boards to track down this bug.

Please all of you who had this upgrade failure, please send the serial numbers and/or MAC address of the RB532 boards.
Send that to support@mikrotik.com

Update on my test.... I downgraded this problem 532A back to 2.9.50 via NET Install.. WHen I went to upgrade via winbox, as I did before to 3.1 as before, with the same file.. I get this on the console..
Mi

Rebooting...
Stopping services...
ERROR: can not install routerboard-3.1: system-3.1 is not installed, but is reqd
Restarting system.


RouterBOOT booter 2.8

RouterBoard 532A

CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand... OK
setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
Starting...
Starting services...

This happened a few times now, WHen I click upload in Winbox, it doesnt seem to upload any files becuase it is done in literally .5 to 1 seconds.. Not sure what is going on here.

I am trying to re-install 3.1 to see if I can re-create the problem, on a 532 with 2.8 boot loader. Not having any luck with even getting 3.1 back on.

Perhaps I should of done something that I didn't? or didn;t that I should have?

Ok, FOrget that dumb thing I just wrote.. For some reason I had a shortcut to the file, and that was what I was uploading ot the board... Found the actual file, uploaded to problem!!!

******* NOTICE *******
This upgrade has, yup, actually crashed the board AGAIN,


Rebooting...
Stopping services...
installed routeros-mipsle-3.1
enabled routing-3.1
Restarting system.


RouterBOOT booter 2.8

RouterBoard 532A

CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand... OK
setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

Current config is Base board, and NOTHING on it, no wireless, no daughet board, Default config of 2.9.50 after 2.950 was NETISNTALLED, and then upgraded via winbox, over ethernet connection (NOT wireless) to 3.1 and Failed.

The problem is clearly re-producable.

Uldis, did you want this board now, or do you want me to try and go back to 2.9.50 and upgrade to 3.2 to see if it is the same issues?

E-mail me again or post here!

I will leave this board in the current failed state.
P.s. Did you want the files that I used to upgrade/downgrade with? Perhaps there was an issue with the actual files and you can compare them to the realeases that you have?

If it is possible maybe you can try again to downgrade to v2.9.50 and then try to uprade to v3.3 to check if that also fails.
So you uploaded only this package?
"routeros-mipsle-1.3.npk"

If the board will fail on v3.3 also then we would like to get that board when it is in the failed state.

Just happen to be around when you posted, Did this right away..

Bad News...
Net Installed 2.9.50 again. Confirmed working condition. Again, Default install, NO wireless cards.
Downloaded 3.3 from Latvia Mirror site ( USA was not working at time) used Web Box to upgrade to the 3.3 version. Below are results.


Rebooting...
Stopping services...
installed routeros-mipsle-3.3
enabled routing-3.3
Restarting system.


RouterBOOT booter 2.8

RouterBoard 532A

CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand... OK
setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.


Did you want me to check anythign on this board? or do anything else?

Additional Info: ( May be helpful? )
I used serial port with Hyperterminal looked at the " Board Info"

I get this:
Board Info:

Board type: 532A
Serial number: REMOVED BY ME
Firmware version: 2.8
CPU frequency: 399 MHz
Memory size: 64 MB

I Removed MAC addresses.

I look at my OTHER 532A that was purchased from the same supplier, but about 4 months later, I check via Winbox and /system routerboard Print command and get:
routerboard: yes
model: "532A"
serial-number: "REMOVED BY ME"
current-firmware: "2.9"
upgrade-firmware: "2.12"

This other board is in operation, and never had the upgrade problem.

My question/ thought is, why is the one with the problem still at 2.8 and the one that worked is at 2.9 ?
Did I miss something? Doesn't the new 3.3 version upgrade the Boot loader too? Perhpas this is part of the problem for the failing board?

we used the same configuration and the board doesn't fail.
We will need that board in the failing state.

Uldis,

I'm in contact with sergejs about my failing boards. They can't be accessed anymore and even netinstall is only partially possible. I have four boards failing, after a upgrade cicle of around 75 units in total.

Do I maintain the contact now with you?
Do I send you the serial and mac. nrs?

Rudy

I just had the same problem going from 3.2 to 3.3

Press any key within 2 seconds to enter setup..
loading kernel from nand... OK
setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

I had to replace the equipment on the tower, not fun. I have another one of these boards running 3.3 rebooting all day - waiting on support to get mack to me with supout feedback.

Scott

Just updating status:
Sent in the problem board 532A to mikrotik today. They should have it within 4 or 5 days. Will wait for results on their testing of the board. Hopefully for all of us they can find the problem by looking at this problem board I sent them. Lucky me, I had a RB112 I could move to where that 532 came from to keep my link up. Man its slow haha
I use that link for live tv and data, with VoIP too.

I will say that even there is this problem with this one board. I am very pleased at the uptime of the RouterBoard's and Mikrotik's RouterOS. I don't know how much better you can get then 99.999% uptime. and with alot of traffic with the live tv, and voip. You guessed it. Not an WISP, just doing my own private links!


Waiting on testing results.......

Appears that on version 3.4 the problem has been fixed according to the change log.

Should be getting my returned board back today.... now if the UPS guy would just be as fast as Mikrotik!