Cisco router returns with a non-working CF or mini-flash card

Somehow, the electricians needed to carry out scheduled work with the organization equipment turned off. According to the plan for the night, employees turn off the equipment, electricians work at night, and in the morning employees turn everything on and rejoice. In the evening, the server, network equipment and UPS were shut down. In the morning, they turned everything on and began to work quietly exactly until the moment when they realized that the Internet connection had not risen, and therefore the organization’s website was not accessible from the outside.

(Cisco 1800 series)


Check the availability of the router, ping. Router is unavailable. We run to look at it in the server room and see that the status LED is in order. So you need to connect to the console.

I did not want to unscrew the router from the server cabinet, so I threw 15-20 meters of twisted pair from the server to our office as an extension cord for the console wire.


We’ve connected and we see an invitation. rommon 1 >So the router could not find or download the firmware. We were not ready for this and climbed to look for a suitable one, but a copy of the router configuration was found.

At first we tried to upload the firmware via xmodem , but the speeds did not impress us so much that we immediately switched to downloading the firmware via tftp. Tftpd and the router firmware file were installed on the computer on the network (in this example, let the address of this computer be 192.168.1.2). The following commands were given on the router through the console: (in the name of the firmware file I indicated the firmware of our test router, because I checked everything on it) And we give the command (the -r switch is important if the memory card does not work

IP_ADDRESS=192.168.1.200
IP_SUBNET_MASK=255.255.255.0
DEFAULT_GATEWAY=192.168.1.1
TFTP_SERVER=192.168.1.2
TFTP_FILE=c870-advipservicesk9-mz.124-24.T8.bin



tftpdnld -ror some unconscious types took it away , because allows us to download the firmware file directly to the RAM of the router bypassing the memory card).

If the startup configuration file (startup-config) was on the same memory card, then the next step is to fill in the configuration we saved through tftp. Or configure the router again from the console.

Router#copy tftp: running-config
(Just in case, I note that Router # is already an IOS invitation, because the system should boot)
We will be asked to indicate the host address tftp, the name of the source file and confirm the name of the destination file.

The router worked as expected, we turned off the impromptu console patch cord and went slowly to look for a suitable memory card.