Upgrading 2500 IOS

If you have at least 8 mb of ram, you can try loading larger images direct into memory from an tftp server.

Hi Vitibor,

You may wish to investigate the Cisco IOS Software Selector:

The Cisco IOS Software Selector finds the right Cisco IOS software and the amount of memory you need to run the Cisco IOS features you want to run on your Cisco platform.

Cisco Feature Navigator allows you to quickly find the right Cisco IOS and CatOS software release for the features you want to run on your network.

Brad Reese Cisco Tools

Thank you Brad,

I have IOS "igs-p-l_111-15.b> Hi Vitibor,

Seems to be the lowest profile image on cco now.

I can't now recall but it would not surprise me too much if a valid 2500 image had the name igs...... the thing is - does it boot? If so you are OK, if not?

I cannot recall what -p- means either.

-l means run from Flash which is to be expected for a 2500.

All 2500 images will support the serial port - Except for POSSIBLY some very restricted specials that were sold through a seperate channel for a while. I forget the details.

Plug in a terminal, turn it on and post the resulting messaegs.

Hi Vitibor,

You may also wish to invesitgate Maintaining and Upgrading the 2500 Router:

Brad Reese Cisco vs. Competitor Lab Tests

Yes it boots normally if R2505 is not attached to another router via serial interface but if it's gets stuck at the moment the lamp on s0 of R2505 is on. The result from terminal is:

System Bootstrap, Version 5.2(8a), RELEASE SOFTWARE Copyright (c) 1986-1995 by cisco Systems

1. This 1 MB of ram is fixed (soldered) on the board. You have a empty dram slot you can populate with either an 4mb, 8mb or 16 mb simm. You need to get cisco compatible (72 Pin?) simms.
2. The 2500 series has two slots for flash memory. One of them is now populated with a 4 mb simm. You can add another 4 mb simm for a total of 8 mb. You can also take the 4 mb simm out and add 2x8mb simsm for a cool 16 mb of flash mem :-)

You really need to max out the ram and flash to run recent ios releases. The latest you can run on the 2500 series is 12.3(20) I think.

You actually have 2M of memory on board your 2500. 1M for DRAM, 1M for I/O buffers. The early and later revs have all the DRAM in the one SIMM slot on the motherboard. There was one period in the middle there that had the router ship with 2M of DRAM soldered on, where you could go 18M, and some images slipped out that said they required 16M, but required slightly more that only ran on the 18M models. Most likely you have one 2M DRAM SIMM in it, but you can remove it and see if the router even POSTs.

Cisco has dropped all support for the 2500, but still keeps around a couple images, but only of the latest variety, so they'll require the RAM/Flash to be maxed out, or at least upgraded beyond most. memoryx.net has a very nice section that describes what slots are what on your motherboard, what what fits into each. Its not that much (relatively) to max out your RAM/Flash.

From an earlier part of this thread, igs was an internal name at Cisco for the next design of the router from the AGS/CGS/MGS series, but then marketing switched to numbers instead, so we got the 2000 & 3000 series routers, which did run the igs-.. images. The next design, the

Take the simm out and reload.

Thanks Drake for idea, I took simm out , reloaded and got:

System Bootstrap, Version 5.2(8a), RELEASE SOFTWARE Copyright (c) 1986-1995 by cisco Systems

Bad memory - wrote zero, read 0xFFFFFFFF at location 0x00000010

Does it mean that I have a simm which have > > Thanks Drake,

Most likely you have a 2M SIMM. They sold all sorts of sizes in the past. Now-a-days, its likely you'll only have 8M or 16M.

And check this out:

Yes it boots normally if R2505 is not attached to another router via

I can't help with the RAM without some research. I am pretty sure that if you do a bit of googling you will find some generic RAM part numbers. Cisco used to list them in fact and may still do.

Your output shows that the router is not booting IOS.

Boot it again without the cable and post the results.

So apparently you have a M/B that has no RAM on board.