Cisco 3550 switch not booting, bad IOS?

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pg021988

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Jan 22, 2014
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Hello,

I have a Cisco 3550 Switch that I have been using to study for my CCENT1 exam. I realized the switch had the incorrect firmware and did not allow SSH. So I loaded the correct firmware through xmodem. The whole transfer took a while but the it eventually completed and said it was successful.

Now, when I boot the switch it gets through the majority of the startup procedures and loads most of the flash. However it halts after it displays the serial number of my switch, and also gives me some random characters instead of numbers.

Any advice? I figure I am probably going to have to recopy the IOS flash again.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Yup your only option is to load a different firmware image. I forget exact limitations on 3550, that is a very old switch. There are some firmware images that do not fit in the memory and will partially boot but then fail. I forget if there were restrictions between the emi and smi images or if you could just load them. It could just be a bad file image also.

It is painful on switches because your only recovery is via the console and xmodem.

I would not use 3350 for any type of study. Things like 802.1q vlan tagging are not supported on 100m ports but cisco may let you configure it. These also support many of the proprietary cisco vlan tagging like ISL and cisco implementations of port aggregation. I think all that stuff has been removed from the certification tests but it makes things confusing when it is on the devices.

They have also made massive changes in the QoS and routing support in the newer equipment
 
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pg021988

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Jan 22, 2014
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I'll try reloading the image tonight, or possibly loading a different image and post how it went. I was trying to use the 3550 as a budget switch. It seems to be working so far. I suppose I could have done more research.
 
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pg021988

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Jan 22, 2014
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I tried another IOS file and it still freezes during the boot. is there anymore suggestions hopefully?

I have an identical switch that is working. Is there anyway to copy the ios image from that computer and load it onto the corrupted switch?
 
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