Banana Pi BPI-R3 OpenWrt upgrade Error with auc and owrt (bootloader update)

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R3/R3 Mini(MT7986)
1

I am truly frustrated. I was trying to upgrade from 23 to 24.10 of OpenWrt. I couldn’t use auc because of the bootloader being out of date. So I ended up flashing a new SD card with 24.10.0 and connecting in on the UART and flashed the SD card image into the NAND using the bootloader. Then booted in NAND and flashed emmc in the bootloader menu. I then re applied my saved configuration from 23. I attempted to run the upgrade to see if I could upgrade in the future with owut using this command.

owut upgrade

I got the following

root@home:/# owut upgrade ASU-Server https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org Upstream https://downloads.openwrt.org Target mediatek/filogic Profile bananapi_bpi-r3 Package-arch aarch64_cortex-a53 Version-from 24.10.0 r28427-6df0e3d02a (kernel 6.6.73) Version-to 24.10.0 r28427-6df0e3d02a (kernel 6.6.73) 19 packages are out-of-date Request hash: 961583e0f933423b806e0d8ff8bb9c851e4e30c6875588f17e520255c18927da

Status: done Progress: 0s total = 0s in queue + 0s in build

Build succeeded in 0s total = 0s in queue + 0s to build: Image saved : /tmp/firmware.bin ERROR: sysupgrade validation failed: stderr = Sat Mar 29 16:46:27 CDT 2025 upgrade: The device is supported, but the config is incompatible to the new image (1.1->1.2). Please upgrade without keeping config (sysupgrade -n). Sat Mar 29 16:46:27 CDT 2025 upgrade: SPI-NAND flash layout changes require bootloader update Image check failed.

So originally, when I tried to upgrade with auc I got the same error. Now after i have updated to 24.10.0 I am getting this same error message. I don’t know what to do to fix this upgrade error in owut. Everything I read about the bootloader says that the new 24.10.0 image I pulled from firmware.openwrt.org and applied through the SD card should have fixed the bootloader error. Any ideas what I do next?

2

So, when you get the warning about upgrading without preserving the configs/settings, you can still go ahead with doing the upgrade without keeping the old settings/configs. After the upgrade is done, you can connect to the device through LAN cable and log in to openwrt and apply your old settings. I see the same warning about upgrading without saving settings and I follow the above steps to upgrade. I have been doing the upgrade like this for sometime now. I just make sure that I have my old settings backed up.

On the reason of this warning, I think it is most probably due to some of the configs in the new format not requiring to be within quotes whereas, those in your old backed up settings would be inside quotes. I haven’t looked into how to migrate the old config into the new config format.