Greetings,
Long story short, I have several routerboards with version 2.x on them. I desperately need to upgrade them and I do not have any of the packages older than 5.x
I need to know where to get them (officially or not).
If I am missing the trick to upgrading past version numbers please let me know.

Just use Netinstall to install the latest version and bypass the old date-based licensing upgrade restriction, which is now officially defunct; old RouterOS will try to enforce it, but Netinstall will not (see this).

After booting up for the first time after the upgrade, immediately Winbox to the router from an internet-connected computer, go to System -> License, and click the Update License Key button. MikroTik's licensing servers will send your router an updated license key that will work with RouterOS v4 and newer. I believe you have 72 hours to do this after the upgrade.

-- Nathan

Fantastic.
How does one enable net-install on ros 2.x?? I can't get to the reset button on the RB without a great deal of work... Can it be done via Winbox or terminal?? I have tried "ethernet-once-then-nand" and I get "input does not match any value of boot-device"
Now what??

What model of RouterBoard? If you are on 2.9.x, it is probably a 230 or a 532, right?

You know that if you hit the TAB key after a parameter name, you will see the list of acceptable/valid options for that parameter, right?
...will show you that the correct spelling of the option is 'try-ethernet-once-then-nand', not 'ethernet-once-then-nand':
-- Nathan

I suggest to go to v 3.30 first and upgrade licence before installing higher versions. Without that you will have big headache.

Upgrade to 3.30
http://www.mikrotik.com/download/all_pa ... e-3.30.zip

then update licence and you can upgrade to 5.26

An echo?

I suggest to go to v 3.30 first and upgrade licence before installing higher versions. Without that you will have big headache.

Eh, not really. Any version 4.0+ will still allow you to update license after you install...you just have 3 days to do so, which should be plenty of time. If you forget and run out of time, you just Netinstall again to reset the timer.

-- Nathan

I tried it recently with 532a. 4.17 was not able to update the licence. I needed to go to 3.30 back and update the licence at least 2-3 times. Then the 6.x was working. Backup the old licence before any change!

What's more. I removed the licence after first update because it was not possible to install higher versions and I read somewhere that removing the licence allows to install higher versions. It was true. I managed to install 6.x but it bricked by missing licence and I needed to connect to serial console to enable Ethernet booting for netinstall 3.30, put the old licence back and make several licence updates to be able to upgrade ros. So don't do this silly thing like me.

Huh. I've never had that problem. Has always worked for me. I would have Netinstalled directly to 6.x and then updated the license, though.

If it took 2-3 times to update license from 3.30, then probably something else was wrong...it should work the first time. Perhaps whatever was preventing it from working with 4.17 was the same thing that made you have to try several times under 3.30. Maybe you had intermittent reachability problems to MikroTik's licensing server, or maybe their server was having problems. I kind of doubt it was 4.17's fault.

Also, when you update license, it automatically backs up the old license to a file named ####-###.key, where ####-### is the old 7-digit software-ID.

-- Nathan

Each time I did the licence upgrade it changed its code. There were no problems with Internet access. Even the licence could be saved automatically, I suggest to backup it manually outside the device. You never know what could happen.