We have experienced one hard failure of an NPE-400 in a 7206 chassis and another probable failure in another 7206 chassis. Both routers appeared to "lock up", i.e. no routing was going on, we were unable to connect to the router via telnet or console but LED's were normal. For the hard failure no amount of power off/on's cleared the problem and the only thing dumped to console was the bootstrap banner upong a power up. On the probable failuure an initial power cycle didn't change the symptoms. A second power cycle was attempted only this time the router was left powered off for 1 minute. Subsequent to this the router recovered. However, we still replaced the NPE just in case it was bad.
The first RMA I received on the hard failure indicated the exact same symptoms as the failed one. They then sent me a 2nd RMA replacement and it booted up once but then stopped booting completely outputting nothing to console.
I found this field notice regarding the NPE-400, http://www.cisco.com/warp/customer/770/fn14484.shtml , that discusses a similar problem. The gist of the notice is that more than one bootable image in bootflash can cause problems. Well, we only have one file in bootflash anyway so this really shouldn't apply to us.
TAC requested that I still try to do the workaround from the field notice but I can't even access ROMMON. At this point, TAC is debating about whether or not to send me a 3rd NPE so in the mean time I was hoping I could get some useful advice from this forum. If anyone has experienced this scenario w/ the NPE-400's or has advice I would appreciate learning about it.
Tks,
