The RE-600 Routing Engine boots from the storage media in this order: the PC Card (if present), then the CompactFlash card (if present), then the hard disk. The disk from which the router boots is called the primary boot device, and the other disk is the alternate boot device.
![]() | Note: If the router boots from an alternate boot device, a yellow alarm lights the LED on the router’s craft interface. |
Figure 1: T320 Routing Engine 600

The Routing Engine 600 (shown in Figure 1) consists of the following components:
![]() | Note: The software on a PC Card is loaded only onto the Routing Engine into which the PC Card is inserted. It is not automatically copied to the other Routing Engine. |
Each Routing Engine has one 10/100 millions of packets per second (Mbps) Ethernet port for connecting to a management network, and two asynchronous serial ports—one for connecting to a console and one for connecting to a modem or other auxiliary device.