Hello MikroTik enthusiasts.

I am submitting this topic as it may help someone else who spent hours on attempting to "de-brick" a MK device.

The entire situation only happened as my long-suffering wife decided to swap the dining room with the lounge and did not want a cat6 ethernet cable running around the side of the room! I bought a very inexpensive MK hAP Lite with the intention of setting up a WDS with an existing MK router. (My earlier attempts to do so using a TP-Link router failed dismally.)

However, on attempting to configure the "new" router it was completely unresponsive inasmuch as there was no WiFi SSID and no sign of life via an ethernet port too.

After much research, I decided to try to reconfigure it with netinstall.

First point: Running netinstall on Windows 10 failed dismally - I know that there are problems with Windows 11. My Linux knowledge is not great but I managed to get the latest routerOS downloaded using a Ubuntu laptop - usually used for Home Assistant. I noticed in the forums that many have had similar problems with Windows.

Second point: The router seemed to have a bit of life as the boot lights behaved as documented and the port led reflected the traffic. However, after a few successful downloads there was still no WiFi and nothing from cable.

I then thought it may be a memory problem so eventually successfully loaded an earlier version of the o/s: 6.49.13. This too had no positive effect.

Then I looked at a few MikroTik videos and was reminded that winbox can connect via a lower level network layer - MAC address.

This worked a treat!

It seems the router was waiting for a response on whether to accept a setup script. There again, I could quite easily be mistaken!

So thank you, MikroTik, for the hardware and software engineering as well as the educational material. And thank you to the community.

Bye for now,

Gerald.

I forgot to mention that the netinstall would only work on Port 1 - labelled Internet.