Q™
IPCT Contributor
I once again have a working camera. Thank you to all those that have offered help and advice and to those that have created the tools to make this possible.
I have a DS-2CD2632F-IS camera that I purchased on ebay. It came with firmware 5.25. I was having issues with it not always saving when I made a config change so I decided to go for a firmware update. Which is now something I will probably leave well alone in the future.
After updating the firmware the device went into a boot loop. I was running in on POE and I could see the amount of power it was using fluctuate as it rebooted.
I downloaded the Hikvision TFTP server software and a different version of firmware and followed the tftp server instructions and tried to apply the firmware. After that the device didn't boot loop any more SADP saw it with IP 192.168.1.64, the serial was showing as CCRR and reported it as version v4.0.8. This was explained that it was in 'Min-system' recovery mode that the camera reverts to when incompatible firmware has been loaded. It has no web services running.
I tried a number of different firmwares and although all of them showed as transferred I never go the system update completed message in tftp
After some more reading I found this article https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthrea...-to-Hikvision-DS-2CD2032F-I?p=56118#post56118 that suggested that if you made a console cable you would probably see a message that said incorrect language settings was the causing the firmwares not to load. This seems to be due to the camera being a grey import where it was a Chinese camera expecting a Chinese firmware but wanting the language set to English.
I downloaded the official 5.3 Chinese Firmware for the camera and then used the Hikvision Firmware tool to set the firmware language to English
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthrea...anguage-extract-files-and-create-own-firmware
This let the camera boot and load a webpage but gave an error of firmware language mismatch: /home/webLib
I then tried to use the custom firmware downgrader
https://www.ipcamtalk.com/showthrea...are-Downgrader-5-3-0-Chinese-to-5-2-5-English
I first chose the 4 line version and couldnt get it to work
In the end I went back to the standard version. I had to use the Firmware tool again to set the language to English and after a reboot the camera was working again