My ADSL router stopped working today (or so I thought) and I wasted an entire day trying to get 2 different routers working only to discover the problem was actually the power adaptor.

The bizarre thing was that the routers actually seemed to be working, they had power and the lights were on, so the power adaptor is the last thing I considered as I would expect the router to not even turn on if the adaptor was screwed. I am  sure that this must have happened to a lot of people who have must have simply assumed the router was screwed and gone out and bought a new one when they didn't need to, so hopefully this may save a few people some money if they read this.

Symptoms

Netgear DG834G v4.
I lost all connection to the router, I could not ping it or access the interface, it was not assigning IP addresses and was effectively useless. When trying to do a factoring reset by holding in the reset button the power light would flash green and red and would not reset.

Netgear DG834 v2.

Everything was working on this one, DCHP was assigning IP's, I could access the interface, I could reset and do everything, however it would not connect to the internet. The Internet light would go green for a few seconds and the router status would show it as connected for those few seconds, then the light would flash orange and the status would show disconnected.

I had some vague recollection of an adaptor issue in the past causing something similar to the latter, but sadly I have no other adaptors in the office with the same voltage output, so my only option was indeed to go out and buy a new router. So I bought a top of the range Netgear dual band 8.11b/g/n QOS router for £99 from pc world. which allows you to give priority to certain services/ports or mach addresses, which is great if you use VOIP as we do which generally requires you to not be doing any other up/downloading at the same time, but using this it will give priority to my VOIP phone.

I Got it back to the office, and then used the new adaptor (same voltage) to test the other 2 routers, and they both worked perfectly.

I am rather kicking myself now as when I originally went home to find my spare router I threw out 3 old sky broadband routers at the same time as they are useless, but I bet they probably had suitable adaptors as I believe they are made by Netgear and I also remembered I have a whole box of old adaptors in the garage that I have been refusing to throw away in case I need them one day LOL.

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