Hi,

Yesterday I used the web GUI to update RouterOS from 7.12.1 to 7.13 from stable channel. Before someone jumps on me. Yes, I read the notes and it said that the upgrade procedure would install the necessary wifi packages, but it hasn't. Everything else seems to be working ok, just no wifi (I used to have two for 2.5GHz and 5GHz wifi, but they have gone. I've tried putting the extra package files in the root directory and rebooting but they won't install.

What has gone wrong and how can I fix it?

Your chateau likely came with legacy wireless driver installed and if you haven't installed wifiwave2 before, it shoukd have wireless package installed still (and it shoukd work pretty much the same as it used to with settings in wireless submenus).
If you want to use the new wifi drivers, then you have to remove wireless driver and (manually!) install wifi-qcom-ac package ... and then configure wifi interfaces from scratch.

If device used to run wifiwave2 in 7.12, then upgrade should go smoothly (it did go smoothly on my audience).

I've netinstall'ed 7.12.1 and restored the settings from backup so back to where I started.

How do you install it manually?

Do you have wifiwave2 installed? If yes, it'll be listed in system->packages ....

No, this device doesn't allow me to select the packages. It just uses one package "routeros" and doesn't let me select what I want (like other devices I have)

OK.

Now do configuration export by executing /export show-sensitive file=anynsmeyouwish in a terminal window and fetch resulting file to your PC. It's an almost complete textual export of config and you may find it handy as reference after upgrade to 7.13 and wifi. You'll have to configure wifi from scratch.

Next upgrade to 7.13, clicking that "upgrade" button should be fine.

After that, go to system->packages and you should see separate wireless package. Mark it for uninstallation. Go to download section on mijrotik web page and download extras ZIP file for 7.13 and arm (not arm64). Ooen downloaded zip and copy wifi-qcom-ac-7.13-arm.npk file to root of storage on your Chateau.

Then reboot Chateau. After it comes back, check list of oackages, it should show routeros and eifi-qcom-ac packages.

After that, go into interface->wifi and configure things from scratch (you'll just see two disabled interfaces without any config).
You can execute /system/default-configuration/print inside terminal window, find wifi section and look at defaults to get some inspiration.

It now won't upgrade to 7.13 from the GUI. It goes through the motions (downloads it, reboots etc) but still remains at 7.12.1

The whole reason of buying Mikrotik products was ease of use, this experience is far from it!

Found this in the log - "upgrade failed, free 85 kB disk space for a (null)upgrade"

I've deleted some config trying to make room and its getting worse!

Upgrade failed, free 109 kB disk space for a (null)upgrade

I give up, the more I try the worse it gets!

upgrade failed, free 121 kB disk space for a (null)upgrade

As I wrote in a few other threads, 16MB flash is a bit tight for ROS 7.13 (my experience is based on hAP ac2, but it's pretty much the same hardware as Chateau). Given your issues with upgrading you may better be off with 7.12.1 for now. Hopefully MT devs will be able to slim it down by a hundred kB or two in next releases.

I have Chateau LTE12 which also have 16MB flash, managed to install 7.13 over Netinstall but it works without free space problems only with wireless package (old drivers).
First tried over Netinstall with wifi-qcom-ac and container packages, after applying from export (not small, 120kb .rsc file) some parts of configuration runs out of space, then after anothoer Netinstall where I replaced wifi-qcom-ac with wireless package it was possible to apply whole configuration. Currently flash free space is 604 KiB of 15.3 MiB, just system is on it.

16MB flash is a bit tight for ROS 7.13

The upgrade of my ancient RB952Ui went smoothly (7.12.1, 16MB flash, 64MB RAM), I have 3176.0KiB remaining. Before the upgrade I made sure that no extra packages were installed and /files/print was empty.

16MB flash is a bit tight for ROS 7.13

The upgrade of my ancient RB952Ui went smoothly (7.12.1, 16MB flash, 64MB RAM), I have 3176.0KiB remaining. Before the upgrade I made sure that no extra packages were installed and /files/print was empty.

It could be that arm architecture needs more space. If not for other things, it comes with quite a few routerboot fwf files.

For sure it needs more space! With the current version the 16MB flash devices with ARM architecture are filled to the brim.
Anything that requires extra space, like having a very complicated configuration, adding extra modules (e.g. adding wifi-qcom-ac and some other package) will cause flash space problems.

What a kerfuffle! Tried netinstall via versions 7.13, and 7.12.1 no luck. Found an older netinstall 6.* (can't remember the exact version) and it formatted disk and installed 7.13 system and wifi-qcom-ac packages. Rebooted and imported my config. Seems to be working okay, but really shouldn't have to go through all that palaver just to upgrade the system OS!

Definitely reconsidering all my recommendations to go with Mikrotik kit.

This is rather worrying:

Free HDD Space 0 KiB
Total HDD Size 15.3 MiB

Glad to see you got it working, but to me it is unclear what happened and why new netintall "did not allow" to select more packages

@clivejo You got wrong advice from someone about "The whole reason of buying Mikrotik products was ease of use, this experience is far from it!". I never recommend MT devices (sorry MT) to anyone who has not have at least some basic networking knowledge, willing to learn new things and has will/time to spare some time on maintaining device. MT doesn't sell plug'n'play routers.

@clivejo You got wrong advice about "The whole reason of buying Mikrotik products was ease of use, this experience is far from it!". I never recommend MT devices (sorry MT) to anyone who has not at least some basic networking knowledge, willing to learn new things and has will to spare some time on maintaining device. MT doesn't sell plug'n'play devices.

I am totally willing to learn new things, but need to have the resources to fix issues. The release notes said the upgrade would be automatic and old packages migrated to new packages. That didn't happen!

All the instructions say to use the latest version of netinstall (7.13) downloaded from website. It didn't work. The device was detected, I selected the new driver package and it said installing, but it failed to reboot and was not upgraded, no messages or anything else to indicate it failed!

Glad to see you got it working, but to me it is unclear what happened and why new netintall "did not allow" to select more packages

It allowed me to select them and said it was installing to the router, it said actually said something weird like "Ordering to install", it only displayed for a split second before saying complete.

I used on my Chateau Netinstall 7.13 for installation which I described in above post. Only problem I have in general with Netinstall (regardless of version) on Chateau is that I need to hold Reboot button until device appear in Netinstall, it doesn't work by steps described in doc for my device (learned in hard way, spend some time to figure it out). Also I'm using Netinstall over wine on macOS.

I used on my Chateau Netinstall 7.13 for installation which I described in above post. Only problem I have in general with Netinstall (regardless of version) on Chateau is that I need to hold Reboot button until device appear in Netinstall, it doesn't work by steps described in doc for my device (learned in hard way, spend some time to figure it out). Also I'm using Netinstall over wine on macOS.

Indeed, learned that the hard way too!! and its not a couple more seconds, it's like 30-40seconds of holding the button! Again, my point, why aren't these quirks documented somewhere?!?

Yes, finger hurting procedure.

Again, my point, why aren't these quirks documented somewhere?!?

Forum is interactive documentation for some things

Surely my disk space should be 16 MiB not 15.3 MiB as reported in resources? Is it not being formatted to the correct size, or has some of it been corrupted? Or was it procured from AliExpress, is fake with a rubbish SD card instead?

It's stated 16MB, arround 15.3 is in MiB, https://www.gbmb.org/mb-to-mib