Recovering a Dell PowerConnect 6248 from bad flash

I took an opportunity to try to get my switches configured for my home lab yesterday – that ended up taking me down a rabbit hole.  It would appear I had the original firmware loaded and the folks I bought the switches from had never upgraded.  As I’ve recently done a number of PowerConnect deployments, I figured this would be a quick effort – upgrade to v2.x then v3.x and go about my day.

Boy was I wrong.

I did manage to get to v2.1.1.4, but upon trying to load up v3.3.3.3, my primary switch indicated that the flash had errors.  So of course, I retried.  This just gave me the same error, just as persistently.   Then I started digging.  In no real particular order, where is what I learned through the day:

• This is not all that uncommon.  A colleague of mine has had to do this a few times when power failures had corrupted the existing flash.
• The PC62xx series has a “secret” boot menu, which allows some more direct diagnostics.
• Through the normal boot menu, you can test and reformat the flash.  Through the “secret” menu, you can perform chkdsk, and recreate the image1/image2 flash area on the disks though.
• PuTTY, doesn’t have XMODEM.  My heart broke a little when my go-to tool, went.  TeraTerm, however, is a free alternative that works with XMODEM!
• If you’re connected to the switch at 9600,8,n,1, and trying to upload over XMODEM, you MIGHT want to change the baud to 115,200.  It’s been so long since I did anything serially, that I forgot about this the first time and it took 3.5 hours to upload.  The same colleague (thanks Rick Byrne!) mentioned above also pointed out there is an XMODEM/1K option in TeraTerm that helps make it go faster – ultimately less than 15 minutes.

This link http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/network-switches/f/866/t/19252166.aspx ultimately has a pretty decent walk through of the process on the switch.   These steps include:

• Power-Cycle and boot into the Boot Code menu
• Select Option 6 to Run Flash Diagnostics for 123 sectors – takes about 3 minutes, twice.
• Power-Cycle and boot into the Boot Code menu
• It will format the flash, and ask you for the MAC and S/T of the switch – which should be on a sticker on the back of the unit.
• Select Option 30 (not listed) and enter the password “pc62xxkinnick” to gain access to the DevShell
  • Select Option 15 and enter creat(‘image1’,2) with single quotes and no “e” on create.
  • Select Option 15 and enter creat(‘image2’,2) with single quotes and no “e” on create.
• Power-Cycle and boot into the Boot Code menu
• Select Option 2 and change the baud rate to 115,200.  Immediately after doing so,  you’ll need to do the same in TeraTerm so that you can continue your session.
• Select Option 4 to download via XMODEM, and select XMODEM/1K
• When you see the CKCKCKCK starting at the bottom, click FILE –> TRANSFER –> XMODEM –> SEND.  Check off the 1K radio button at the bottom and select your file.  The console indicates it is waiting for XCODE.BIN – your file can be named as it comes (ie: PC6200v3.3.3.3.stk) as the XCODE.BIN is just what it receives the file as.  When it unpacks it, verifies it and writes it to flash, it names it correctly.
• When that is complete, at the Boot Menu, select Option 7 to Update Boot Code.  This will do so, and reset the switch(es).  Make sure you reset your term program to 9600 baud, or after it reboots and defaults back to 9600 baud, you will think you have an issue with the switches.

I wish I had some of the screen shots from my failure, as it would let me capture the exact wording so if in the future someone is having a similar option they might find my post.  But via the above, I was able to get the switches up to v3.3.3.3.  Switch 1 still has some issue with Image1 area of the flash, but I can live with that for now.