Recovering a bricked Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 using JTAG – Part 1: the hardware

I got a Linksys WRT54GL v1.1 router that somewhat worked and somewhat didn’t: it booted alright (no led errors), responded to ping on its default IP (192.168.1.1), bot other than that, it did not respond on the web interface, nor telnet/ssh, nor dhcp.

I tried the 30/30/30 reset , tried TFTP recovery – nothing worked.

As it had the original Linksys firmware, at this point it was either a hardware failure or the only recovery course would be the JTAG reflash.