Cisco IOS images are copyrighted, you need a CCO log on to the Cisco website (free) and a contract to download them. There are others ways for getting them but advising you of that would be against Cisco's legal protection and I do a lot with Cisco and so will not suggest them. The Cisco CLI Analyzer (formerly ASA CLI Analyzer) is a smart SSH client with internal TAC tools and knowledge integrated. It is designed to help troubleshoot and check the overall health of your Cisco supported software.
One of the more difficult tasks in configuring Cisco routers is when you have to copy the IOS image to Cisco Router from the ROMmon Mode. ROMmon mode is a very basic mode where most of the IOS commands will not work.
If you want to see which commands work in ROMmon mode, you can see them using the ? or help commands while inside ROMmon mode.
Most of the times ROMmon mode is activated if the configuration register of the Cisco router is not set. You only need to set that register value in order to boot properly through the Flash image file. Confreg is the command for setting the correct register value.
- Where I Can Download Cisco IOS Softwares Disclaimer The Author of this posting offers the information contained within this posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose.
- Oct 28, 2018 - Options. Here are some suggestions on ways to get Cisco images: Cisco website: Download images directly from Cisco:.
- How to download the Cisco IOS. Say that you buy a used Cisco router off of Ebay. It is running an older version of the Cisco IOS and you would like an upgrade to it. First let me point out that, if you read the Cisco IOS licensing agreement, the Cisco IOS license is non-transferable. Purchase a maintenance contract for the hardware.
But if you want to load a new IOS image in the router Flash, you will need the tftpdnld command for this purpose. Tftpdnld command runs in ROMmon mode and has some requirements before it can be executed. Before going to the requirements, let’s go through the Router connections.
- You will need have a valid Cisco IOS image which is to be loaded in the Flash of the router. The image should be placed inside the TFTP working directory.
- A TFTP server needs to be running on the network from where the router can get the IOS image.
- The PC on which you are operating and the router should be connected to the same network.
- You will need to connect to the router using the console port.
- The first FastEthernet interface of router is used to copy the image from the TFTP server by default.
At ROMmon mode, issue the following commands with variables according to your own environment.
rommon 1> IP_ADDRESS=172.16.17.230
rommon 2> IP_SUBNET_MASK=255.255.255.0
rommon 3> DEFAULT_GATEWAY=172.16.17.254
rommon 4> TFTP_SERVER=172.16.17.235
rommon 5> TFTP_FILE=c2800nm-ipbase-mz.124-3h.bin
There are two things that should be noted. These commands are case sensitive. That means IP_ADDRESS should not be typed as ip_address. It didn’t work for me. And the second thing is that the subnet mask that is accepted is 255.255.255.0. I work with the general subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 which didn’t work and the router gave Illegal IP Address error upon execution of tftpdnld command.
Download Cisco Ios Image
After setting the above variable, you will need to run the tftpdnld -r command. The -r switch will automatically load the IOS image that will be uploaded through tftpdnld command. Before running the tftpdnld command, you may use the set command to see that all the variables are set correctly.
After the copying of the new IOS image is complete, the router will automatically load it into the memory. You may be prompted for the initial configuration if there is no startup-config available to the router.
You may reboot the router by using the reload command and confirm to see if the router boots to the newly installed IOS image by default. Otherwise you will need to configure the configuration register by using the confreg command.
In my case, although the router booted successfully using the new IOS image, but the image was not present in the router flash memory. To see your flash contents, issue the following command:
How To Download Cisco Ios
router>show flash
In ROMmon mode this command will not work. You will need to use the following command instead:
rommon 1>dir flash:
You can use the copy command to copy the new IOS image to the flash once the IOS loaded from ROMmon is running.
router>copy tftp flash
I hope this will be helpful for network administrators working with Cisco equipment. I had hard time finding out all this information that why decided to document it here so that everyone else can find and implement it easily. Your comments will be highly appreciated.