Manual Image upgrade Cisco AP 4800

[TsvetanVladimirov7864]

Greetings Experts,

I hope you are doing well.

I am creating this discussion as I've been troubleshooting an issue with out 4800 AP.
We have a WLC 3500 running 8.10. tier version. 
We also got some new 4800 APs that came with 8.7. version.
Interestingly they cannot recognize the response from the WLC, so I decided to upgrade them manually.

First AP totally broke, to the point where both partitions are crashing.

The second AP, has one failed partition, which crashes - part2  and one that works fine - part1. The image 8.7 is on that partition, that is working fine.
Now I've tried all that I can think of to get to overwrite this image based on my knowledge from previous versions of AIreOS, but it always overwrites the part2 which is not working and I couldn't find a way to install images directly on part1.
Even if I set in u-boot, the environment to be part1 it still doesn't download the new image version on part1. 
I'm out of ideas.

How can I overwrite the image on the particular partition? Is there a command for that?
I would really appreciate if someone can direct me to a link or a document where we have the new partitioning/filesystem explained and any command reference where I can find how to set the image I want to on the partition that I want to.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers!
Tsvetan

[patoberli]

Can you share the complete boot log that you get from one of the 4800 APs while you have a console cable attached?

Which 8.10 release is running on the WLC? And which 8.7 release on the APs?

Is the time/date correct on the WLC (is NTP correctly configured)?

[TsvetanVladimirov7864]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.
I will try to get you both boot logs, I didn't get the second on this pc. The one I am uploading Is the one that reloads on either partition.
Have in mind that there are 16APs already on the WLC which we were able to upgrade.
Only those two are the ones that were not able to upgrade.
WLC Running 8.10.162.0

Old version 8.7.106.

What I could see in the other boot log file, that Im not able to share, is that when using the broken partition we get a reload reason: critical system crash. And capwapd process fails. Then it loads the working partition and we see that the AP cannot decipher the join response form mwar 0.0.0.0

And now when I looked into this boot log file i saw a message that Hardware is NOT Cisco Authentic... whatever that means.

Thanks in advance for looking into it.

[Dustin Anderson]

the hardware not authentic is a fault and you may have to RMA the APs. We had about 7 of 600 APs with the same error and TAC RMAd them all, so it's either a bug, or failed hardware.

[Leo Laohoo]

Faster to just RMA the AP.  

[TsvetanVladimirov7864]

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for your replies.

RMA it is, however I still don't understand how to browse the filesystem of those APs and where in the partitions the images are saved. On old AireOS you could see the image file in the flash, you could do a md5 checksum, you could browse directories and all that. On those APs it seems nothing like that is possible, or I am mistaken?

I would highly appreciate if someone can give me more details on that matter! Mostly, explanation if this is somehow linux related and if normal linux commands don't work, then how to access shell if there is a way?

Thanks again to everyone!

Cheers,
Tsvetan