The most uneventful WRT310N V2 8MB FLASH upgrade

 I bought this router at a thrift shop a long time ago for $5 mostly for its Gigabit Ethernet. It has been gathering dust as I have other ones with better specs.

Linksys WRT310N V2

Recently I need its 4MB FLASH for something else and my orders haven't came it.  I made a backup of the chip with my programmer.  3 months later, one of the orders finally showed up. I burnt a copy of the old 4MB image into a 8MB SPI FLASH: MX25L640EM2I.  It is important to keep the binary image of the chip as it contains some specific factory NVRAM settings e.g. MAC addresses that are not in the .trx file.

It boots up and showed 8MB in the status and managed to save a new setting. i.e. the FLASH chip is recognized.  I took a risk and upgrade to an image intended for 8MB device.  The worst that could happen is that I have to burn in a 4MB image and compile my own 8MB to support it.

It turns out that generic builds files with 32K NVRAM, MIPSR2 and without USB under the K26 directory works fine so far.  I picked the Max configuration with the full features set: 
freshtomato-K26-NVRAM32K_RT-MIPSR2-2023.1-Max.zip

It took about 90 seconds for the upgrade.  The most annoying part is to figure out the user name and password.  It took me quite a few tries as the username was changed to root from my previous firmware. Rest of it is uneventful.

It is good that the generic build recognizes the model as well as the correct FLASH size.

Status Overview showing router name and specs

Firmware version