What Could Be More Simple Than Replacing A 6509 Supervisor…?

Noting…unless of course you are me 🙂

Here’s the situation. We are doing user aggregation on a 6509 chassis. Due to cost considerations, we only put a single Sup in. We had a power supply failure which subsiquently killed the super…don’t ask me how, but it did. I quickly threw in a redundant sup720 I had to temporarily replace the dead sup32.

Luckily I ordered the supervisor from Canvas and they replaced it. I’ve been trying to schedule the replacement install for about 9 months now…my sup32 baby was finally ready to be born, so away I went.

I backed up the config from the temp sup, then cleared it. I then inserted my replacement sup32 and booted it…when it came up in…CatOS, aww what the poop!

It’s been a million years since I’ve used CatOS, so I had to google how to put a management IP on the thing.

show interface
set interface sc0 172.16.84.17 255.255.255.0 172.16.84.255

I then googled how one would go about converting from CatOS to IOS. I stepped through the process easily enough. I uploaded IOS, cleared everything out and configured it to boot to Rommon. Nice.

When in rommon I issue the next command:

dir disk0:

and I get an error. No big deal, I uploaded my image to bootflash and to disk0…the fact that disk0 won’t read isn’t a deal breaker. I then issue:

dir bootflash:

and I get an error with a message stating

Resetting .......

No matter what I do I can’t get any CF to read in disk0. I try formatting from another router. I try formatting then loading IOS…NOTHING WORKS! I get fun errors like “cannot load the monitor library” and “cannot determine first file name on device “disk0”.
I even tried setting the confreg mode to “the boot helper image” and nothing happened.

After much time and anger, I was pulling the supervisor out and noticed the the bootflash sitting there…So, I replaced it. I then booted the chassis and issued:

dir bootdisk:
boot bootdisk:name-of-ios.bin

and BOOM. There is the image. Apparently the corrupted bootflash just bricked the router.

Needless to say that I was relieved, but good lord could that have taken longer or been more frustrating? Note to self, if bootflash is acting a fool, replace it immediately and save yourself some heartache.