kevin,
If you unplug the power cable and hold down the Mode button and plug it in, keep holding the Mode button down for about 15 seconds. It should skip the normal boot procedures and present you with a switch: prompt. Then you can either erase the IOS and re-install it, or upgrade your IOS (looks like you have an old one). To do that, you will have to download your IOS from Cisco's website, and store it on a TFTP server, or locally. Perform the procedure I first mentioned in this post. At the switch: prompt you then do an init_flash and then you can do a dir flash: to see the name of the IOS .bin file you have. If you are going to copy the IOS from your local directory, you will want to issue the set baud 115200 command so that your transfer rate while be significantly faster. You will have to restart HyperTerminal and change your bits/sec to 115200. Now issue the copy xmodem: flash:filename of new IOS. command. Choose Transfer > Send File. Choose xmodem1K for your protocol and then navigate to the location where you stored your IOS. Click send. When finished, issue set baud 9600 command to return to standard baud rate. Restart HyperTerminal again to change your bits/sec back to 9600. Issue dir flash: to verify the file was copied over and to see what the name of the file is, then do a boot flash: filename of new IOS. This should reload the switch. Log back in to the switch, conf t, boot system flash:filename of new IOS, end, sh boot to verify the statement is there and correct. You can either reboot again or leave it like it is, but now you should have a working IOS.
