Recover Cisco 7201 from Corrupt Boot Images

[mike.devens]

Hopefully this is the right place for this post, if not I apologize. I acquired a Cisco 7201 router for my home lab, but the boot image is corrupted. The router attempts to boot from multiple locations before giving up and moving to ROMMON. I tried to download a binary for the router from Cisco and put it onto the flash card, but the router cannot read it, saying that the device does not contain a valid magic number. At this point I've given up looking through all of the documentation and am hoping that someone out there can help me fix this router. I do not have any other 7200 series routers, so I cannot build a valid flash card from one of those.

I have also tried to use a USB, but the router does not seem to recognize the usb drive, despite being formatted to FAT with a 256 MB partition.

Thanks for the help!

-Mike

[Vinit Jain]

Hello Mike

the most likely cause of the problem is a corrupt flash. You may try to format the flash from the rommon mode. (not sure if your rommon version supports format command but some rommon version do).

You can try to attach another external flash with proper image and see if that works.

Hope this helps.

Vinit