Solved: upgrade 877 flash

davidjbradley · ‎11-12-2008

hi, I'm considering upgrading the flash memory in my 877, but I'm unsure what will happen when I swap out the 4gb flash for a 16gb flash.

The flash composes of on-board flash and the expansion flash module. My router has 20gb on-board and a 4gb expansion card.

What I'm not sure about is when I replace the 4 with a 16gb what will happen? Will the flash get corrupted? and sureley the IOS will be corrupted leaving me to XMODEM the IOS back?

Thanks,

Dave

kmccourt · ‎11-12-2008

I've done this before without a problem, but it's been a while. The most important thing is to first of all back up your IOS image and config to a local TFTP server as it will be gone after the upgrade. This will give you the chance to test your TFTP server for the next step :)

Whenever you pull the old flash and install the new one the router will complain but should boot into ROMMON. The quickest way to reload your IOS is via the ROMMON tftpdnld command - it's a lot quicker than xmodem. I think tftpdnld has to be done over FE0 and it is important to note that the commands are CaSe specific.

For more details see the 'Disaster Recovery' section of http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/access/800/850/software/configuration/guide/rommon.html

Finally, there's a discussion of the issue at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,16511692

The ninth post gives one person's guide to doing the upgrade. Good luck!

View solution in original post

kmccourt · ‎11-12-2008

I've done this before without a problem, but it's been a while. The most important thing is to first of all back up your IOS image and config to a local TFTP server as it will be gone after the upgrade. This will give you the chance to test your TFTP server for the next step :)

Whenever you pull the old flash and install the new one the router will complain but should boot into ROMMON. The quickest way to reload your IOS is via the ROMMON tftpdnld command - it's a lot quicker than xmodem. I think tftpdnld has to be done over FE0 and it is important to note that the commands are CaSe specific.

For more details see the 'Disaster Recovery' section of http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/access/800/850/software/configuration/guide/rommon.html

Finally, there's a discussion of the issue at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,16511692

The ninth post gives one person's guide to doing the upgrade. Good luck!

davidjbradley · ‎11-12-2008

thanks, that's really good information!

andrew.butterworth · ‎11-13-2008

I recently did this on my 877 at home, I upgraded both the DRAM & FLASH. As the previous poster said it will initially boot to Rommon so you need to back everything up first and perform a 'recovery' using TFTP.

When I got mine back up and running I noticed that there were no time/date stamps on any of the files in flash so once it was running IOS I did a write erase and re-copied the files back so now it looks all peachy.

Andy