Recovering from a bricked Netgear EVA8000 in Linux

I have done dozen of firmware upgrades on many devices over the years. Despite all the warnings about bricked devices, nothing bad ever happened to me when flashing firmware. That is, until I bricked my Netgear EVA8000 media player on its upgrade to firmware 2.1.83 this weekend...

The unit would indicate that it was applying the upgrade, advance to about 70% completion, and then just switched off on me. Any attempt to switch it back on afterwards failed.

Fortunately, Netgear has a recovery procedure for this type of event, and a HOWTO is here. This should work out-of-the-box on Windows, but my laptop runs only Ubuntu.

No problem though: I managed to unbrick the unit from Ubuntu, like so:

1. Pull the power plug on your EVA8000


2. Download the recovery tool from here, as indicated on the HOWTO page.


3. Install a TFTP server on your computer. I used the tftpd-hpa package:
   
   • sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa
   • sudo vim /etc/default/tftpd-hpa
   • change the "no" field after the line starting with "daemon" to "yes".
   • sudo /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa restart


4. Unzip the recovery zip file, and copy the eva-recovery-image.bin file to the TFTP server's root directory:
   
   • unzip eva8000_recovery_tool_2_0_159_uk.zip
   
   
   • sudo cp eva-recovery-image.bin /var/lib/tftpboot
   
   
   
   


5. Change the IP address of your computer:
   
   • sudo ifconfig eth0 10.23.23.200


6. While depressing the EVA8000's reset switch, stick its power cord back in. The unit will download the recovery file. After about 4 minutes, it reboots and all is fine.