Question about swapping HDD on failed Cisco ASA 5545 to new Cisco ASA 5545 replacement

[gently2727]

Hey Guys,

Question about the subject. We have a Cisco ASA 5545 HA setup. The primary  ASA failed on us and the standby is currently handling all traffic. We received the new ASA 5545 (grey market) in, and need to replace the bad one... 

Can I just swap the hard drive? Remove from the bad ASA 5545, and put into the replacement ASA 5545?

The replacement firewall did not come with HDD. Can i do the above, or will i have to wipe the HDD clean?

Anything I need to be aware of?

Thanks in advance!

[Marius Gunnerud]

swapping out the HDD should be fine as the ASA's will not preempt when the primary becomes active again.  You need to manually initiate the failover back to the primary.

But to be on the safe side take a backup of the current configuration and licenses.  Although something should work without errors this is not always the case as experience has shown me from time to time.