We have a number of IE2k, IE4k and IE3x00 switches installed on our production sites.
One of the benefits are easy replacement of faulty switches by operations personnel, without networking knowledge, by moving SD-flash card to the new switch.
During a panic upgrade from 17.3.x to 17.12.x on a handful of our IE-3300 switches (due to a PROFINET/MRP-Ring bug), all of the switches got stuck in a boot loop. They loaded 17.12, upgraded bootloader and then restarted but could not load 17.12 and started loading 17.3 image instead, causing a bootloader downgrade, rinse and repeat.
When we did a hard reset, they booted up the new IOS image, but could not find any startup config. This triggered a restore from SD-flash, but it never recovered and instead froze up in this state:
Autoinstall: No start-up config. Triggering swap drive
Bootable image ie3x00-universalk9.17.12.04.SPA.bin and config found in sdflash:
Restore in progress...
Building configuration...
[OK]
Setting boot variable - Install
After another hard reset, the switch booted up, but with factory default startup config.
After some research, digging into the release notes, we looked at this :
I did some troubleshooting on two new switches, swapping SD-cards, but could not get any of the switches to boot from the config on the SD-card. In version 17.12.x there isn't even an option to sync from SD-flash to onboard flash which there is on at least 17.9.x.
Is there no more easy replacement just swapping SD-card on this platform? Or, which i hope, i've done some configuration error. Anyone with ideas? Experienced the same?
