catalyst 6500 network boot

[glen.grant]

    Have an issue where we need to get a 6500 up on a image.  It is older sup 720 with 64 meg of bootflash and no pcmcia card .  Can you boot these off the network There is enough nvram to handle the new images.   These new images are almost 100 meg and we don't have a spare pcm card laying around.  Have been unable to find docs on how to do this or even if it is possible.

[Leo Laohoo]

Sup720 with PCMCIA cards?  I've never heard of this before.  I thought the Sup720 comes with CF slot(s)?

[Jon Marshall]

glen.grant wrote:
    Have an issue where we need to get a 6500 up on a image.  It is older sup 720 with 64 meg of bootflash and no pcmcia card .  Can you boot these off the network There is enough nvram to handle the new images.   These new images are almost 100 meg and we don't have a spare pcm card laying around.  Have been unable to find docs on how to do this or even if it is possible.

Glen

Apologies for delay in responding to this. The 6500 switches with 12.2SX do not support network booting (as you have probably worked out by now !).

From the 12.2SXF release notes -

•Catalyst 6500 series switches and Cisco 7600 series routers do not support network booting.

From the 12.2SXH release notes -

Cisco IOS software Release 12.2SX does not support network booting.

Jon

[glen.grant]

   Yeah we eventually ended up scarfing up a compact flash card  from somewhere , Leo you are correct it was a CF card, for some reason it looked like the slot was larger than it was .

[Leo Laohoo]

Thanks for the confirmation.  The best thing, in my opinion, is to load the IOS into the CF.