While there doesn't appear to be alot of local activity on these items, I thought I'd pass along my latest notes on this ...
I have quite a few of these routers (for play mostly, some ran asterisk) and at one point early this year (late last year?) I had thrown on a whack-job of a firmware image that made the device inoperable -- not that this was an expensive router (v5 with only limited ram) it did have some usefulness ... so, since I had a little bit of time and this baby was sitting in the closer for quite a while, I went back to it ... wouldn't accept any firmware's thrown at it at all for some reason -- since I didn't have a jtag hanging around, (not that I could find it even if I tried) I tried the ol' "fry-the-flash" trick (shorting pins 15 and 16 together on the flash chip) ... (You *really* have to have a magnifying glass to see each of those pins!) ... so, fry they go and reboot and voila -- and re-send the fresh new better improved firmware for dd-wrt (micro) onto it and it takes it .. wait a few minutes and it's back in normal operation again :-) happy days.
While this is still quite a useful gadget -- I can turn off the router functionality and merge it's port with the other 4 ports of the switch to get an extra port! (That I like -- I really need a bigger switch)
The usual cautions -- opening and every shorting your circuits will void anything you have for a warranty if you really care ... and you really can do this with a jtag ... probably safer too. ;-)
I still have one netgear router to fix up from a bad openwrt firmware image ... will see how long this one takes ...
Dan.