I had this problem too on a Cisco 887 VAW.
I was following all of the guides on the web for handling Cisco AP's and kept running into your error message whenever I ran ether_init. The critical thing here is that the AP is integrated. I finally found this:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/wireless/ap802-integrated-access-point/200047-AP802-Image-Recovery.html
Because the flash on the 802 AP is accessible from the 887, you can copy the file onto the 887 and then extract it direct onto the 802AP.
Use this command to copy the 802AP firmware onto the 887
copy tftp flash:
then this to extract it onto the ap's flash
archive tar /xtract ap802-k9w7-tar.153-3.JC5.tar flash:1:
obviously, your tar might be newer than mine, but the important thing is that its flash:1: and not just flash:
I followed the article and switched back to the AP's console (ap:)
and keyed in this:
set BOOT flash:/ap802-k9w7-tar.153-3.JC5/ap802-k9w7-tar.153-3.JC5
reset
I might have got my path wrong as the reset had some errors at the start but it found the image to boot anyway. Once it was back up and running I did a
service-module wlan-ap0 reset default-config
and anything that might have been wrong in it was gone now and my ap was operational again.
