2501 Hangs at bootstrap

E

encoad 19 years ago

Hi Everyone,

I'm working on my CCNA and bought two 2501s. Both have 16megs of flash and RAM, they are not identical, they were made at differen times and the mainboards look slightly different. One works perfectly. The other seems to hang at or right after the bootstrap:

2500 processor with 14336 Kbytes of main memory

-----------

It never goes beyond the above text. If I CTRL-BRK the router, I get to the ">" prompt which I believe is ROMmon. If I set "o/r 0x2101", then "i", the router will reboot, but it will once again get stuck. I can still get into ROMmon, but I have no clue what to do beyond that.

All of the recovery procedures that I've been able to find involved settings 0x2101 and getting past the bootstrap then using TFTP to download a new IOS bin file. Is it possible to do the TFTP from within ROMmon? it seems I have some commands available to me when I do a "?", but I don't see any way to set the IP address of the TFTP server.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I know its pretty silly to be wasting time on a ten year old router, but I certainly learn alot more when things don't work right.

Nicholas

Vote

D

Doug McIntyre 19 years ago

Not a good sign. Try swapping memory between the two boxes? Try setting the config register with bit 8000 set (o/r 0xa101) to get more diagnostics about what is hanging inside POST.

You aren't getting far enough for password recovery. The 2501 ROMMON doesn't support TFTP. It has a boot ROM and Flash ROM, so you could always fall back to boot ROM to get something new TFTP'd into FlashROM. But you are failing before any of this, you are trapped in POST.

Well, if you bought it from somebody, I'd do a return of it if they offered it right away. If not, you may have a doorstop, as its not getting past POST.

Vote

E

encoad 19 years ago

I've pasted the results from 0xa101 to the bottom of this message. Everything appears to be ok to my inexperienced eyes.

I tried swapping the memory. The "dead" router booted up and got me to a real command prompt, though it did spit out some errors. Mainly stating that such and such is not support etc... Maybe a version mismatch of some kind?

Is it possible I just have a dead flash memory simm? (just to confirm, my 2501 has three pieces of replaceable memory, the pair is the RAM right? And the single is the Flash?

This is what I figured. Bummer.

Good advice, though for the $20 bucks this thing cost me it isn't worth the trouble. Plus I feel I got a good deal on the other one, and he tossed in some AUI converters, so I won't complain.

So should I try to find a new 16meg flash simm?

---------------- Exiting boot state - setting bus error vector...[OK] Sizing RAM and ROM...16 bit wide EPROM...8 Mbit EPROMs...32 bit wide CPU RAM...F ound 16 MB CPU RAM...[OK] Testing low memory...0's...1's...address+1...[OK] Sizing memory...writing...reading...at 0x1000804, expected 0x4000, got

0x2E00333 2 16384 pages...memsize() returned 0x01000000[OK] Setting cookie...[OK] Setting memory to all ones...[OK] Setting up exception vectors...[OK] Enabling processor caches...set CACR to 0x2101...[OK] Processor type is: 2500[OK] Enabling timers...[OK] Enabling Watchdog timer...[OK] Sizing NVRAM...found 32K bytes of NVRAM[OK] Searching for system code...found at 1010000, magic number = 4E56... [OK] Setting up monitor variables...No 2MB soldered-on...16MB only... found 14336 total Kbytes of DRAM, iomem_base set to E00000[OK] Reading hardware revision register... 2500 processor, hardware revision = 14 Parity Logic tests...[OK] Exiting to monitor command level

2500 processor with 14336 Kbytes of main memory

--------------------

Thanks again, Nicholas

Vote

W

www.BradReese.Com 19 years ago

Hi Nicholas,

You may wish to investigate Cisco Hardware Troubleshooting:

formatting link

Hope this helps.

Brad Reese

formatting link

Vote

E

encoad 19 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion Brad, I had already checked out those Cisco pages, they weren't much help. Most of the advice that's out there implies that you have to get IOS loaded before you can fix it. (which seems odd).

I'm guessing my Flash memory is toasted? Any else think the same?

Nicholas

Vote

F

fred 19 years ago

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

i believe you will find that the single simm is the ram and the pair is the flash memory.

f

Vote

2501 Hangs at bootstrap

Join the Discussion

Didn't find your answer?