Cisco boot sequence
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
- Switch loads a power-on self-test (POST) program stored in ROM. POST checks the CPU subsystem. It tests the CPU, DRAM, and the portion of the flash device that makes up the flash file system.
- Switch loads the boot loader software. The boot loader is a small program stored in ROM and is run immediately after POST successfully completes.
- Boot loader performs low-level CPU initialization. It initializes the CPU registers, which control where physical memory is mapped, the quantity of memory, and its speed.
- Boot loader initializes the flash file system on the system board.
- Boot loader locates and loads a default IOS operating system software image into memory and hands control of the switch over to the IOS.
The boot loader finds the Cisco IOS image on the switch as follows:
- Switch attempts to automatically boot by using information in the BOOT environment variable.
- If this variable is not set, the switch attempts to load and execute the first executable file it can by performing a recursive, depth-first search throughout the flash file system, each encountered subdirectory is completely searched before continuing the search in the original directory. On Catalyst 2960 Series switches, the image file is normally contained in a directory that has the same name as the image file (excluding the .bin file extension).
BOOT environment variable is set using the boot system global configuration mode command. To preview the current IOS boot file is set to use:
show bootvar show boot !in older IOS versions