Cannot erase flash:

[tomswanger]

Hello,

I purchased a couple old 2600 routers to learn more at home.  I wanted to update the firmware and all went well on the first router.  On the second the router hangs on erash flash:  It will start showing e's and when it get's to five e's it just sits there forever.  I cannot get anything to respond on the console, but it does respond to pings.

I can get the router to boot by using tftpdnld -r in rommon so I can continue to use the router.  

It's not a flash problem as I can swap modules between my two routers and the "good router" works with both flash modules and the "bad router" works with neither.

None of this is a big problem because I'm just trying to learn and I can get the router to boot, but I'm really puzzled by this behavior.  The only thing I can think of is something has failed in whatever circuitry addresses the flash.  

Has anybody ever seen anything like this before?  Anybody have any idea what has failed.

Thank you.

[Sam Smiley]

I am assuming this is an old 2600 router and not the 2600XM; there is a difference in the flash. The older 2600 only had 16 MB of flash, towards the end of support Cisco was releasing IOS images that would barely fit on the tiny flash. The 2600XM devices were huge with up to 48 MB flash. In order to load the later images for the 2600s you had to issue the no squeeze option with the erase command. It should look something like this:

erase /no-squeeze-reserve-space flash:

I could see where this may have an effect on the erase depending on which IOS version is installed.

Cheers,

Sam

[tomswanger]

Thank you very much for the suggestions.

The card is well seated.  I've already had the router opened and swapped flash card with a known good one.

No joy on the erase /no-squeeze-reserve-space flash: command.  Same result as simple erase.  I get five e's and then it hangs.  I'm going to write this one up to a hardware problem with some portion of the circuitry that addresses the flash and move on.  Thankfully I can still bring the router up with tftpdnld -r and a ftfp server so I can continue my studies.

Thanks again for trying.

[Richard Bradfield]

So when the router is up, what do you get when you do a "show flash" does it see the flash at all

if it does you can always try a erase flash again

[tomswanger]

show flash looks like this:

System flash directory:

No files in the System flash

[0 byes used, 16777212 available, 16777212 total]

16384K bytes of processor board System flash (Read/Write)

When I try erase flash: it starts but hangs after the fifth 'e' is displayed each time.

[Sam Smiley]

You do not have to erase the flash to load an IOS. The flash is already erased, have you tried loading an IOS on flash? When you copy the image to the flash I seem to remember it will give you the option of erasing the flash, selecting no will simply copy the image up.

Cheers,

Sam

[Richard Bradfield]

Please open it up and check the seating of the flash card