Utility for doing a hard reset on Airport Graphite?

Aug 25, 2005 4 Replies
N

I am having some difficulty doing a hard reset on an original graphite. Someone said there is a utility somewhere which is designed for multiple systems which is no longer available on the Apple site which does the trick. Does anyone know where it might be located now?



I have connected to my G4 using an ordinary Ethernet cable (I originally tried the crossover cable and it wouldn't see the airport at all) and the base station appears with the name NOTYOURNETWORK and the correct IP. It asked me for the password so I put in Public and that crashed the computer, which is running Panther so it must be something pretty drastic wrong. Re-starting with the Airport in place and doing this again just gave me the message that it couldn't get into the configuration setup. Presumably someone has changed the password.



I must have pressed the hole for over a minute at the correct time about fifteen times by now, both when powering up AND when the three lights show. And the unit does seem to be functioning properly as it does seem to be cycling properly and it shows NOTYOURNETWORK on other computers on my network: But again, all show it with that darn network key required. Is there supposed to be a way around this or am I STILL doing something wrong? (I have already posted about using Apple Doc 58613 and everyone seemed to run out of ideas when that reset procedure didnt work). I can see that I shouldn't be able to reset the password over the air but surely I should be able to do this on my own unit somehow on a hard wire? I wonder if that utility would accomplish this and if so, where it is now or if any one knows of some other way to reset the system? Can I force it to RE-load the firmware somehow? I know that on a car, you can sometimes get a dicky starter motor to work by quickly changing terminals on the battery before the change has had time to blow anything on the circuit and am wondering if there is an Airport equivalent of this to force some type of hard reset when



58613 doesn't work?

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J

How to do a grand reset:

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I've seen this reset problem on the original Airport base stations and on some Lucent RG-1000 boxes as an early symptom of defective capacitors. If you feel ambitious, open the case and look for bulges or leaks near the two power supply electrolytics.
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don't approve of the butchery performed in fixing the problem. Just replace the caps with identical value and types. Also, note the comments on the PLCC chip that's loose in the socket. I've seen this problem after the airport gets dropped.

I don't know about Mac software for configuring the airport but you might want to try some of the PC based alternatives.

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N

Thanks for the reply guys, it now shows me two things: Firstly, I thought that I was going crazy but in fact sometimes the apple reset procedure indeed doesn't work, - as I am experiencing: In which case, as is set out on that page: "Rebooting the ABS without the WaveLAN card in the carrier worked - the ABS would complete the boot process, but wasn't of much use without a transmitter. I had to reset and try to upload the new firmware several times before it took root. After I had managed to update the firmware and the location settings, I re-inserted the WaveLAN card and the ABS became fully functional again. Unfortunately, it was a long and somewhat arbitrary process - reset, look, reset, upload firmware, etc. Perhaps the ABS needs to go through several cycles to purge the old settings... who knows. Now my original ABS is fully functional again and I won't make the same mistake twice that caused it to go in the first place." How on earth can Apple design and put a product like this on the market in which you can enter complex details but which cant be reset by pushing on the reset button which is there for this precise purpose?

Secondly, this seems like an unnecessarily complicated procedure if the unit won't go back together easily; and if purging the old settings is all that complicated, it is probably better to dump the unit, not to mention wonder if the whole problem might be caused by needing to replace caps etc.

Anyway I am now reassured that this isn't something I have done wrong or that I was just mis-identifying the amber glowing LEDs as red ones and may see if someone wants to tinker with it (somewhere like on ebay)

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N

Lemme rephrase that before anyone takes anything out of context: There was one essential step left out of 58613: If you keep the reset button pressed in for 30 second periods, plug the power line in and take it out when the cycle has finished, keep doing a few times, do this this while restarting the computer (it causes OSX to start in frozen mode but let's not worry about that too much as it didnt do it TWICE), and then do it again a few more times

THE UNIT RESETS ITSELF

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R

Yeah, I've done this, easy soldering job. I've probably got some capacitors left over that fit.

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