Standard Compact Flash Card In A Cisco Router

It’s well known that Cisco wants to sell you a 512MB compact flash card for $150. So, what’s so special about the Cisco branded ones? They have a Cisco sticker on them.

One fancy sticker there

I just bought a couple of 2GB compact flash cards, formatted them in my router, and they work like a champ!

No flash card inserted:
Router#show flash
%Error show flash: (No device available)
Router#

Insert new 2GB flash:
Flash card inserted in flash. Reading filesystem on the device…
Wait for the completion message before accessing device
Filesystem read completed in flash.
Device in flash available for use

*Oct 6 19:59:18.411: %FILESYS-5-CF: CompactFlash inserted
Router#show flash
%Error show flash: (Invalid DOS media or no media in slot)

Time to format the drive with the good old format command:
Router#format ?
flash: Filesystem to be formatted

Router#format flash:
Format operation may take a while. Continue? [confirm]
Format operation will destroy all data in “flash:”. Continue? [confirm]
Format: Drive communication & 1st Sector Write OK…
Writing Monlib sectors.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Monlib write complete
….
Format: All system sectors written. OK…

Format: Total sectors in formatted partition: 3905809
Format: Total bytes in formatted partition: 1999774208
Format: Operation completed successfully.

Format of flash complete

Now to check the drive:
Router#show flash
No files on device

1999437824 bytes available (0 bytes used)

It takes a whole 2 minutes to take a standard off the shelf compact flash drive and prepare it for use with your routers. Now you can super size your order with all the money you will save!