Install Netgear DG834 firmware on a sky router

I recently was given a sky router by a friend, which actually turned out to be a Netgear DG834GT but with sky’s own firmware on it (probably just a tweaked version of the netgear firmware but with some aspects disabled).

I decided to try and remove the sky firmware and reinstall the original sky firmware. I discovered a good guide on how to do this on the skyuser forum, this is the post i used.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to recover the router, as the recovery tool you have to use causes Vista to Bluescreen! I initally thought i’d bricked the router but as i spent more time researching i discovered that it could still be saved!

So this post is basically to provide more advice to people wanting to re-flash their router, mainly highlighting a couple of things missing from the guide in the skyusers post above.

1. DO NOT USE VISTA! The Netgear recovery tool does not work properly on Vista, and every time i tried it caused my computer to bluescreen.
2. Make sure you only have one firmware file in the directory. This is the problem i had and until someone mentioned this on another site i had two firmware files in that directory. As soon as i took one out it worked. Just for reference, when both files were there the recovery tool didn’t see the device. I tried several computers but no luck. I went back to the original XP machine i used and made sure i had just one firmware file and it worked stratight away.
3. You may need to set a static IP address. If you do, use the following settings:

IP Address: 192.168.0.2

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Default gateway: 192.168.0.1

DNS Server: 192.168.0.1

Without the post on the skyuser forum i would not have managed to recover my router, so a lot of thanks goes to all the users there. I hope this post helps anyone else in the same situation, please post if this is of use to you.