Bricked iDS-7204HQHI-K1/2S(C) no HD or LAN

maxvr6

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So i did a very silly thing and tried to remotely update the firmware on this DVR over the LAN from iVMS-4200 when i knew the LAN had very high latency... halfway through the update it failed and now the DVR is bricked.

Symptoms are DVR powers on but does not boot at all, nothing from VGA or HDMI ports, no HD light, no LAN light (cant find the device in SADP either) and does not beep on power up.

After a lot of research i found some threads here regarding the firmware flashing process so got myself a USB TTL UART module and the appropriate wires and downloaded the latest firmware for this model.

Bear in mind i have not done anything like this before and am just following instructions...

Setup TFTPD32 and Putty, configured per instructions, opened a session, held CTRL + U and powered on the DVR, to my surprise things started happening but not the result i hoped for, please see attached CTRL+U log file.

If i boot the DVR without holding CTRL+U i get a different result that may help provide some info, see attached boot log.

Can anyone glean anything from these log files and point me in the direction of the next steps please?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 

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maxvr6

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Just to clarify the reason for trying a firmware flash in the first place was to resolve the issue of the cameras constantly dropping off, i knew this was likely the high latency on the LAN but i thought id try anyway, yes this was just asking for trouble but i was getting extremely frustrated... anyway the network issues have since been resolved i just need to get this DVR working again.
 

alastairstevenson

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Can anyone glean anything from these log files and point me in the direction of the next steps please?
With the caveat that I've not seen that DVR before -

Interrupt the bootloader with Control-U
Then at the command prompt, use

printenv
and
help
to see the variables and available commands.

You may have to use
setenv ';printenv'
and
setenv ';help'
to get round the silly attempt to hide the commands.

Then you're looking for the update or upd command to trigger a firmware update using your tftp server.
 

maxvr6

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Ok im an idiot, after reading printenv i can see i hadn't set the network of the laptop im using accordingly, then went into TFTP and set the server IP accordingly and things started happening straight away!

Looks like i have successfully reflashed it and there is life once more, HD and network lights are back on and the GUI had loaded up :)
 

alastairstevenson

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Excellent! Well done. Re-flashing the firmware this way will reset the device to it's default configuration, so you'll need to set it up again. Unless you have a previously exported file you can import.
 

alastairstevenson

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i hadn't set the network of the laptop im using accordingly, then went into TFTP and set the server IP accordingly and things started happening straight away!
So (now no longer using just the phone so I can now see your PuTTY logs) I'm curious what command (if any) you used to recover the DVR.
In your transcript I see no update command.
So was it the built-in 'probe for a tftp updater' that re-flashed the firmware?
I'd have expected that to rely on the Hikvision tftp updater (or a clone of it) that supports the verification handshake.
 

maxvr6

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Once i had everything setup correctly i just used the command:

setenv bootcmd ‘;update’

Thats literally all i did, the whole process took care of itself from there :)
 

alastairstevenson

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Once i had everything setup correctly i just used the command:

setenv bootcmd ‘;update’

Thats literally all i did, the whole process took care of itself from there :)
That does make sense - that's what others have also used when the bootloader 'update' command is missing.
 
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