Cisco 3550 switch not booting up.

[andisonmarcial1]

Hi guys,

I  left my 3550 switch running for two days doing a home lab , and powered it off when i was done...(it was working fine) When i decided to power it back on,it took some time before the led light came off and when i started putty, the screen was just blank. I tried pressing enter and nothing showed up.

Any idea of what might of caused this? 

[Mark Malone]

Hi

when it boots does the sytem light go green at all or does it stay amber , hopefully the board itself has not gone.

Do you see anything when consoled in during boot process , like its trying to load or is it just completely blank

[andisonmarcial1]

Hi Mark,

All the lights go green and then back to normal...and no i don't see anything during the boot process.

Just a blank screen.

[Mark Malone]

The system light should stay green or at least flicker green to show its ok depending on platform

You had config on it yes as it was lab , if you connect to it by Ethernet on same range can you ping any of your interfaces that were configured , this may prove the device itself is ok but something could be up with the console connection

You should be seeing something during bootup , even garbage characters , even if the something is up with flash internally you would usually see something on console to suggest a failure , have you tested your console on another device just to be sure incase something went faulty with that

[andisonmarcial1]

I changed the console cables and i'm having same problem. The lights also stayed green for a minute or two before going off. 

I didn't save configs so i cant ping any of the interfaces. 

[Mark Malone]

without console access at all there's not much you can do unfortunately , you could try recover hold down the mode button while consoled in and see if it goes to rommon at least while booting switch>

If that's not working either theres not much else you can really do something internal could be gone on the switch

[andisonmarcial1]

I tried that, but nothing.

Thanks anyway.

[andisonmarcial1]

By The way Mark, the same time my switch went down, my 2600 router went in to rommon mode and i don't know what the heck to do.

[Mark Malone]

That's strange did you have any power issue locally usually takes something like that to cause a router to go to rommon and a switch to die like that but at least the routers recoverable if you have rommon , if it corrupted the only image in flash if there's not multiple ios though you will need to do an xmodem to recover it

Try this doc first

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/routers/2600-series-multiservice-platforms/15079-recovery-c2600.html

Then for xmodem this doc

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/routers/2600-series-multiservice-platforms/15085-xmodem-generic.html

Also YouTube has loads of videos on xmodem as its one of those things that only happens now and again that you have to do it , if theres multiple images though you could try boot them first instead

[andisonmarcial1]

Hi Mark,

I opened my router and noticed that i don't have flash memory installed. Could this be a cause of me not being able to find the ios?...and if i do install one, should it boot up normal?

[Mark Malone]

Yep that would definitely be an issue as the IOS is stored in flash , if you do install a flash you will still need to load an image on it before it boots but should work fine then , you should be able to initialize flash through rommon as well

!--- The Cisco IOS image file (.bin file) is stored in !--- the flash: directory on Catalyst

[andisonmarcial1]

Where can i get the tftp and ios to download?

[Mark Malone]

You will need a contract for the IOS to download from Cisco if you don't have one you will probably find a 3550 IOS online easy enough if you Google the full IOS name as its an eol switch

https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=275935152&softwareid=280805680&release=12.2.44-SE6

tftp server there free on google ---tftpd32 is one free app you can use

[andisonmarcial1]

I found a solarwinds tftp version, can that work?

[Mark Malone]

yes should do any tftp server will do