There may be situations where your Ubiquiti devices are no longer accessible due to firmware
corruption. This can happen for various reasons, but most commonly, from electrostatic discharge
on the Ethernet cable or power loss during a firmware upgrade. If you are unable to access
your devices no matter what you try, we recommend attempting Uubiquiti's firmware recovery process
before sending them back for RMA. Although this process cannot recover all Ubiquiti hardware, it
can be applied to all the wireless product lines which include the UniFi, airMAX and LTU ranges.
Recovery of these devices requires us to send firmware to them which can be done using the
trivial file transfer protocol or TFTP. This means you'll need TFTP software. The transfer
can be done with a native server built into your operating system or with third-party software. In
this video, we'll be using PumpKIN, as it can be installed on all major operating systems.
We'll also leave a list of other software vendors we have tested in the description.
Once you have decided on a TFTP software you'll also need to get the latest version of firmware
available for the device you are recovering. These can be downloaded directly from Ubiquiti's
website. Just head over to ui.com/download and find the firmware applicable to your device.
Now it's time to put the device into recovery mode. This can be
done by holding down the reset button for approximately 30 seconds while powered on.
This will initiate a system reset and shortly after the device will be in recovery mode.
Some devices, such as airCubes, require you to hold the reset,
then power it up to initiate this process. The LED status on airMAX and LTU devices
will flash in a two on, two off sequence. For UniFi devices you'll notice the LED
will cycle through white blue and off states to indicate that they are ready to receive firmware.
Before we send any firmware, we'll need to change our IP address to allow the device to communicate
with our TFTP software. The device, while in recovery mode, uses its default IP address,
generally 192.168.1.20. So we'll need to adjust our IP address in
our machine to be in the same range or subnet. We'll make this 192.168.1.2
Once IP's are configured, and if this is an airMAX or LTU device, we recommend pinging the default
IP, as it should respond. If your device does not reply, we recommend resetting and starting over.
If you're repeatedly unable to ping the default IP, it's likely that your device has permanent
hardware damage. UniFi devices, however, do not behave in the same way, and will not respond to
ping requests so you'll only know whether the process works once you try upload firmware.
Our next step is to launch our TFTP software. To upload the file,
we need to select 'Put File' and browse for the firmware we downloaded earlier.
Now input the IP address of your device in the remote host field and leave the port default.
Assuming everything is fine with the hardware, the firmware should upload in a few seconds,
your device will reboot and after a couple of minutes will be accessible.
To check if everything was a success, we recommend using Ubiquiti's device discovery tool
as this should detect your connected products and confirm whether they are running the
version of firmware used for recovery. If you are still unable to access your device,
the problem could be hardware-related and we recommend returning for testing if it's within
its one year warranty period. It's also important to note that manufacturers warranty only covers
products that are installed professionally and does not cover any power-related damage.
That's it for our Ubiquiti recovery video and hope you find it useful. Let us know
if it works for you in the comments. If you are enjoying our videos consider subscribing
to our channel for the latest content. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Tim from Scoop