Router not recognizing USB stick.

Good morning!

I just began setting up my CCNP/CCNA-V lab and started to upgrade the IOS versions on them. I was initially going to just install the IOS via Flash drive but I soon discovered that only 2 of my 4 1841's are recognizing my flash drive. I really don't want to think that the usb port is simply bad because that is rather rare these days, but what else can I troubleshoot? Anyone else experience an issue like this?

PS: Noob question altert: I believe the answer is no, but but if you upgrade the IOS version to 12.4(T), I wont lose any functionality/features if I leave my bootstrap version at 12.3/12.1, right?

PPS: I'm planning on pruchasing a rack and looked up the measurements of my 2950's and 3550's and I noticed that some are 17'', some are 18'', and one is 19''. How can I buy a rack that these will all fit into? Can it be slightly adjusted?

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Comments

theodoxa

JoeBirds wrote: »

PPS: I'm planning on pruchasing a rack and looked up the measurements of my 2950's and 3550's and I noticed that some are 17'', some are 18'', and one is 19''. How can I buy a rack that these will all fit into? Can it be slightly adjusted?

I have various Cisco Routers (1760, 2650, 2801, 2811, 2821, 3745) and Switches (2950, 2960, 3550, and 3560) and with the sole exception of the 3745 they all fit on my rack (Chatsworth 2-Post) just fine with no adjustments.

The rack mount ears for the 3745 are screwed up and don't match up with the holes unless it is mounted incorrectly. I Googled it and found another person who mentioned the same problem, but no solution. For now, I just placed a shelf directly under it and let it support the 3745.

My only complaint otherwise is the 1760 only has two holes and using the tiny screws most ears come with, it sags a little in the back. My last set of ears came w/o screws, so I bought some at Home Depot and found they do a better job. Having Four holes on the 1760 [like on the ears] would have also helped keep the router perfectly level.

Mrock4

As a workaround, you could connect one of your working 1841's with one that isn't detecting your USB stick, and TFTP from one to the other.

StussyNz

Check the formating of your flash drive? My understanding when I use to lab on physical equipment I had to format my flash drive to a FAT format; Away from the traditional NTFS (Windows) format.

Carpe Porcus

What is the size of the USB drive? I use a 4GB drive and it works fine but it won't recognise drives other than FAT format. Considering one of the routers recognises the drive, you could assume you have a FAT formated USB?

The new IOS 15.X supports FAT32 as far as I am aware, do you have different IOS versions on the router? I had this issue and putting all routers on the same IOS version removed the problem.