rommon os, rx boot ,

[sarahr202]

Hi every body!

I have few questions about the following excerpt from my book:

" In the more recent additions to the Cisco router product line,Cisco routers use only one other OS (ROMMON) whereas older Cisco routers actually had two different OS ( rxboot,Rommon) to perform different subsets of these same functions ( password recovery,to copy new ios into flash when flas has been erased or corrupted,troubleshooting).

My question are:

which above mentioned functions are performed using only RXboot in older routers?

Which above mentioned function are performed using only ROMMNON in older routers ?

Thanks a lot and have a nice weekend.

[Lucien Avramov · Accepted solution]

You get to rommon when the router can not load the rxboot image or IOS image into memory.

The boot image is a subset of the Cisco IOS® Software that is used to download main Cisco IOS Software images to the router using TFTP in recovery situations. The user can interact with this image through a command line interface signified by the prompt Router(boot)#. Some platforms (Cisco 1600, 2500) have it in ROM; others (high-end routers) have it in bootflash. Depending on your platform, this image may be called xboot image, rxboot image, bootstrap image, or boot loader/helper image.

The boot image has limited capabilities. For example, it does not contain routing information.

From rommon you can go to the boot image and then upgrade the code for example:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/hw/routers/ps214/products_tech_note09186a0080110ed1.shtml

as the boot image have more features than rommon and it's easier to copy an ios image from the boot image.