Upgrade DD-WRT While Keeping Stock Firmware Intact

I’ve installed dd-wrt on my 1200AC linksys device over a year ago.  There has been many updates since and I’ve decided to update my firmware to catch up with any bug fixes or new features introduced over the past year.

However, I’d like to keep my stock firmware, rather than allowing dd-wrt upgrade to over-write my stock firmware partition.

How it works, when you install dd-wrt for the very first time, it will be installed on a second partition, while keeping stock linksys firmware on one partition.

However, when you updade the firmware directly in dd-wrt, it will over-write the stock firmware partition.  To avoid that, I have to reboot to stock firmware and then install updated dd-wrt firmware again.

There are several ways to achieve this:

• Power cycle method
  • Turn off your router with its power button and then turn back on
  • Then wait for 2 seconds and turn if off again and then turn it back on
  • Then wait for 2 seconds then turn off and back on again
  • Your router should now boot with your stock firmware
• terminal method (I’m using 1200AC device, therefore, commands are specific to this device)
  • ssh or telnet to your router
  • find out which partition is your stock firmware in
    • ubootenv get boot_part
    • and look for the last number.  It should either be 1 or 2
  • switch to stock firmware partition
    • ubootenv set boot_part n
    • where n is either 1 or 2.  If your previous command shows 1 at the very last line, then you should use 2 here.  Otherwise use 1.