Good morning, I try to understand the boot process of a msfc2 in cat6500 in hybrid mode. After reading the appropriate docs at CCO and some practise, I understand how to boot it and mostly (*sigh*) it works. Asking these detailed questions to ppl also administrating cat6k revealed a deep lack of knowledge ;-( Can anyone enlighten me/us? --- I understand, that there are 4 mechanisms on the msfc2: --------------------------------------------------------- 1. config register 2. BOOT variable (???) 3. BOOTLDR for helper image 4. 'boot system' statement in nvram config I assume, that there are 3 image types: 1. ROM image -> loaded when all fails 2. a c6msfc2-boot image -> loaded when other image fails (that's what I've read, but I watched, that it is booted each time, also when a loadable normal image is reachable on bootflash) 3. a c6msfc2 -> regular image Now we have different situations: ---------------------------------- a) an image is defined in nvram config 'boot system' and the image is on the bootflash -> image loads b) an image is defined but not on bootflash and there is an 'boot' image on bootflash -> boot-image boots my q: - is the position of the boot image of any relevance? I heard, that it is important, that it is the 1st file on the bootflash. Is this right? - does this just happen, when the config register has the appropriate value of 0x2000 ? - what is the exact role of the 'BOOTLDR'-variable? c) no image defined, config register 0x102 and boot image is on bootflash -> ???? my q: - What happens? d) an image is defined in the 'BOOT'-variable -> ???? my q: - what is the sense of the boot-variable? - how is it set? e) image is on ata-flash-disk and a boot image is on bootflash. image is defined via nvram 'boot system' -> since the appropriate image is not found, it boots the 'boot' image from bootflash, reads the nvram config and sees the sup-disk0 and loads the real image as a replacement my q: - is this correct? ------------ Especially I've a problem with setting the boot-variable (during normal operation of a regular booted image). router#sh boot BOOT variable = sup-disk0:c6msfc2-jo3sv-mz.121-19.E.bin,1 CONFIG_FILE variable does not exist BOOTLDR variable does not exist Configuration register is 0x2102 tia & greetings, Jochen Kaiser -- Dipl. Inf. Jochen Kaiser, GPG 0x3C93A870, phone +49 9131 85-28681 Network Administration mailto:jochen.kaiser@rrze.uni-erlangen.de Regionales Rechenzentrum Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany Homepage and PublicKey: http://ipv6.rrze.uni-erlangen.de/~unrz111