Or, how to break a Netgear router in one easy step... this evening I 'accidently' installed a broken firmware image on to my poor little Netgear DG834G... it killed it, in a previously (to me) unseen state. Panicing slightly, I booted in to XP, threw a network lead between me and the router, and fired the recovery tool at it. No joy... pondered for a bit, tried again... still nothing... pondered some more, held reset button, took out power, put power back in, yay! flashy lights! that looks pretty... fire up tool again, nothing. Keep wondering what it's got against my network interface... try the tool on the wireless interface, I get a stage closer, it doesn't whinge about the network card, weird. I then realise that I'd removed the wireless interface from the bridge a few days ago in XP... hrm... removed the bridge entirely, fired up the recovery tool, pointed it at the correct interface, prayed, and was amazed as it found the device. Watched it upload the firmware, and then verify it. Watched it reboot itself and waited for the lights to come on. YAY! It all came back nicely (except that I still haven't fixed the minor bug in my firmware that doesn't seem to get dnsmasq up correctly).

Anyways - all back up and running now, I'll break it again in the not too distant, to fix the dnsmasq foo :)