various HW questions on my recent find...

config reg is in password recovery mode which is why it appears to be not saving the config.

conf t config-register 0x102 wr mem reload

That'll fix that.

Memory, you you're going to need lots more. Both DRAM and Flash. You only got 32M DRam and 4M flash. Memoryx.com has some decent pricing on cisco approved memory.

-Brian

Thanks Brian. I thought maybe there was something wrong with the memory, but the password recovery register makes sense - I remember doing that in a 3512XL.

So I can navigate the hardware with faith... The DRAM are the DIMMS on the NPE board right. And as for the flash, I imagine that is the single SIMM slot on the I/O board.

Question, what are the PC cards for? I see alot of 7206 units on ebay that come with a PC card, and even claim to run the IOS of it... Is there any particular reason to do that?

This might be a dumb question, but... Where is the IOS stored? Its not on that 4Mb flash SIMM is it? If it was, and I upgrade it with a larger SIMM, I would lose my IOS wouldn't I?

-John

You can tell by the "(boot)" prompt that you post. Thats your first tipoff, besides looking at the config register report.

Check out the MemoryX site that he quoted. It'll show you a picture of the board, the memory slots laid out, tell you if you need to install in pairs, etc. But yes, generally until you get to the gigabit processor, your DRAM is on the NPE, and the Flash is on the I/O controller, which ever models of those particular two that you happen to have. You must have the earliest I/O controller that still had IOS Flash on it. The later ones did away with this as part of your next question.

They hold the Flash memory. Officially, Cisco supports only linear flash cards in the slots, which are small & extremely expensive. One thing you could do though is to put in an ATA Compact Flash into a CF to PC Card adaptor, make sure to format it on that system, and use it. The I/O controllers do support both linear flash as well as ATA flash.

Yes, yours is on the 4MB flash SIMM. Later I/O controllers did without it, and just started using linear flash cards in the PC Card slots.

If you remove the Flash SIMM, then yes, the IOS is gone, although you will still have your boot IOS image. You should save your IOS image up to a TFTP server first (copy flash: tftp:) and you can then recover it.

Thanks for info. The memory X site has the PC card flash modules for around $200. So I could get one of those, then copy my IOS from flash SIMM over to the PC card flash, and them I'm all set - and can scrap that old 4Mb SIMM. That SIMM is really old, so I would feel much better with my IOS running on the newer PC card flash.

I imagine there is boot setting that tells the 7200 to grab the IOS from the PC card instead of the onboard SIMM, right? Well, thats down the road. Will be ordering my parts now.

-john

essenz a écrit :

Keep it. There's no problem using it along one or two PC flash cards. It's used for storing the bootloader that can be required for managing some hardware and for booting off a tftp server. It's also used by the router to copy "crashinfo" files when the router has problems. These can be used by Cisco to determine the cause of a problem.

The SIMM is called "bootflash:" The PC card are called "slot0:" and "slot1:".

To boot from a file called "foobar.bin" on slot0:, you would type;

Router# configure terminal Router(config)# boot system flash slot0:foobar.bin Router(config)# end Router# copy running-config startup-config

Take note that a new "boot" statement will get added after any existing ones, so if you already have:

boot system flash bootflash:

and you simply type the comands as listed above, you'll end up with:

boot system flash bootflash: boot system flash slot0:foobar.bin

And your system will still boot from whatever was in the bootflash:

The age of the 4Mb SIMM worries me though (8+ years). Can you replace it? The memoryX site only had DRAM and Flash PC cards, didn't see anything for flash SIMMs...

-John

Francois Labreque wrote:

Its unlikely that the former owner of the card rewrote it all that many times. I doubt its anywhere close to the 10,000 writes a Flash chip is good for or whatever it was for the earlier ones.

Even if you had the router crashing all the time with crashinfo files all over, they are still limited to a fixed ammount (30? or so) so things don't get out of hand.

I wouldn't worry about a flash chip going bad in a cisco.

Thanks to everyone for their input.

One final question.

Certa router(boot)#:

Dont I have to do something to get rid of that "boot" thing. I have a feeling thats why some core commands are missing.

-john

Doug Mc> >The age of the 4Mb SIMM worries me though (8+ years). Can you replace