PIX 520 not booting from floppy, failed upgrade

[3shoolgmail]

Hi Group,

This is sort of urgent for us so pls send in your valued inputs at the earliest.

We had two Cisco PIX 520 (REV D0) running in failover mode. We decided to upgrade one of them to the latest software, I think 6.3 or 7 version. The upgrade failed and one of the firewall is down since more than 5 days now. Booting from floppy also fails. Till now I have tried both version 5 and 6 to try and get it up and the upgrade fails saying "Checksum error". I tried a different floppy also but the same error.

Yesterday I also tried pressing the "reset" button on the front panel hoping that to reset PIX to factory defaults but that too did not help.

I believe NetPro is my last resort of solving this issue else its going to be difficult for us.

Please do send in your thoughts at the earliest.

Thank you & await your reply.

[a.kiprawih]

Hi,

Can you get into console? If you can, try to use the 'Upgrade the PIX Firewall from Boothelper or Monitor Mode' method (see reference url below).

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_tech_note09186a0080094a5d.shtml#upbootormon

Since you mentioned booting from floppy was unsuccessful, just for reference, can you verify the boot disk creation proceedure under 'Create a Bootable Diskette from Microsoft Windows'.

I've experienced similar issue with checksum error last time, and it was due to the image file size. In this case, I assumed that you have sufficient flash memory.

Rgds,

AK

[3shoolgmail]

Hi,

On your suggestion I tried Boothelper and looks like it could get me the solution. I was able to get a prompt using Boothelper. On prompt I was able to download the pix615.bin (I tried pix635.bin also) but then the PIX failed with an error "Wathdog timeout error..." and it rebooted.

Could there be a issue with Flash? Its showing 5345792 bytes in flash while the actual image of pix615.bin is 2193408 bytes.

Thank you.

[a.kiprawih]

Hi,

Can you tell me what is your flash memory size and available space?

It could be due to insufficient flash memory to keep the version that you're trying to upload - due to the previous image (from unsuccesssful upgrade) that was still there.

Anyway, fyi, to know your exact flash memory size, see the following info:

http://www.ciscotaccc.com/kaidara-advisor/security/showcase?case=K11936144

But I believed you already have sufficient flash memory as PIX 6.x need bigger space.

Rgds,

AK