I used an RB150 as my main router at home for years and years until one day after a power outage, it would no longer boot up. I have since replaced it with something else, but recently brought it to work because I have all manner of console cables and switches available there, and I thought I might be able to get it working again. It'd be nice to have it as a backup router or if maybe someone else wanted to play around with it.

After connecting a console cable, I can see a "kernel not found" error, so I initially thought that was hopeful. Since trying to reload an NPK file via DHCP, serial/XMODEM, and Netinstall/BOOTP, without any success, I now have much less hope. With DHCP and serial, I get the "invalid upgrade file id" error and I couldn't ever get Netinstall to recognize the board, at least with my work PC (which has three network ports, so maybe that has something to do with it?)

The hardware seems to be fine, so I hate just to toss the thing, but maybe it's time to quit fiddling with it and put it in the recycling bin?

Thanks.

If you can make the board try network boot (easy with serial console, where you can just select the option) and it looks like it's trying, it should show up in Netinstall. If you didn't use Netinstall with this PC, it's possible (and I'd say likely) that the problem is there.

I know that such a thing (flashing an image via TFTP) is common with other "consumer-grade" router brands, but it is a common misconception that you can flash a RouterOS NPK directly using either serial console or TFTP. That isn't possible.

Serial console XMODEM upload is only for bootloader flashing (RouterBOOT itself, not RouterOS). For TFTP, it expects to be fed a bootable image (something that it stores in RAM and then executes, not something that it writes directly to flash). An NPK is not executable. If you mean that you set up a BOOTP server and told it to feed an NPK to the board, RouterBOOT isn't going to know what to do with that when it downloads it because it's not an ELF binary.

What you need to do is to simply download and run the Netinstall application on a PC, and plug ether1 of your router into the PC's ethernet port. Netinstall containts a built-in BOOTP server and an application that it feeds to the router via BOOTP that then in turn allows you to feed it an NPK to flash.

Please read the Netinstall documentation on the Wiki for proper usage. I have also written a step-by-step HOWTO in another thread: located here

-- Nathan