After accidentally overwriting /etc/config/network on a TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 V2 today… I went looking for ways to recover without a JTAG header and a FDTI adapter. Playing around with the reboot/reset I finally got it into some kind of recovery mode. I saw ARP 192.168.1.66 which is followed by it asking for ArcherC7v2_tp_recovery.bin.
Since as far as I can tell this feature is totally undocumented for the Archer C7 V2 and its addresses are slightly different from previous models. I figured I’d put this out there for anybody else looking to fix one of these things without resorting to a soldering iron.
First, install some kind of TFTP server
apt-get install atftpd
Download a factory image of OpenWrt. I use snapshots until chaos calmer is released since I want 802.11ac support in luci and iwinfo.
wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
Make the router think its getting a normal recovery firmware
mv openwrt-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin /srv/tfptd/ArcherC7v2_tp_recovery.bin
Now, configure your network card for 192.168.1.66 and power on the router while holding down the reset button. The router itself will come up as 192.168.1.86 when in recovery mode. It should take a little bit to transfer and then restart. (lights will flash) After that you should be able to telnet to 192.168.1.1 and start configuring openwrt.