2600 Error

I recently ran into an interesting problem and thought I might share with you folks. One of our 2600 routers crashed and when rebooted, entered ROM monitor. I did a dir flash: to see if the IOS was still in there, it was. I checked the confreg and saw that it was set to 0x2102. So I just did a reset to see if it would load the IOS. It failed with the message:

System Bootstrap, Version 12.2(8r) [cmong 8r], RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 2003 by cisco Systems, Inc.
C2600 platform with 262144 Kbytes of main memory

loadprog: bad file magic number:      0x0
boot: cannot load "flash:"

So, I tried reset a couple more times, same thing.

Then I just tried boot flash:iosname and it loaded up as if nothing was wrong. Off the top of anyone's head, is this indicative of any typical problems? Such as failing flash, or something to that effect.

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Comments

Aquabat [banned]

wow that is strange! mabye some type of corrupt flash or something. mabye when it saw the flash mem was corrupt it just defaulted into rommon

iproute

Thanks for the reply Darby. I conducted a quick test in my lab to validate my idea: when "boot flash: " is specified, it'll load the first IOS found in flash: (I believe that's what I read in the study material). Here's the result:

rommon 1 > boot flash: 
program load complete, entry point: 0x80008000, size: 0x4be268
Self decompressing the image : ########################################## (and so on) [OK]

              Restricted Rights Legend

Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is
subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph
(c) of the Commercial Computer Software - Restricted
Rights clause at FAR sec. 52.227-19 and subparagraph
(c) (1) (ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer
Software clause at DFARS sec. 252.227-7013.

           cisco Systems, Inc.
           170 West Tasman Drive
           San Jose, California 95134-1706



Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software 
IOS (tm) C2600 Software (C2600-D-M), Version 12.1(4), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 1986-2000 by cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 30-Aug-00 09:00 by cmong
Image text-base: 0x80008088, data-base: 0x8091058C

And it proceeded to load the IOS w/o issue. As such, the router should have been loading the IOS in flash with "boot flash: "

Am I misunderstanding?

Thanks.