Recovering Primary Compact Flash

To recover a primary compact flash disk with a corrupt or missing operating system, you must copy a special JUNOS software image directly to an unformatted (raw) device. Recovery images are available from the same location as normal J-series software upgrades. (See Downloading Software Upgrades from Juniper Networks.)

The images use the naming convention junos-jseries-release-cfnnn.gz, where release is the software version and nnn is the target compact flash disk size in megabytes—128, 256, or 512.

To recover a primary compact flash disk:

1. Plug the compact flash drive into a PCMCIA adapter or USB card reader on the host PC, and verify that it is recognized by the operating system.
2. Copy the JUNOS software image to the host PC and uncompress it with the compression utility.

   The uncompressed image must have the same size as the target compact flash capacity: 128 MB, 256 MB, or 512 MB.

3. Copy the JUNOS software image to the compact flash disk with one of the following commands:

   You must use the correct target device name. Failure to do so might damage other storage devices connected to the host PC.

   • On a UNIX PC, use the command dd if=filename of=/dev/device_name. Replace filename with the name of the uncompressed image, and device_name with the name of the unformatted PCMCIA card device. For example:
     root# dd if=junos-jseries-7.0–20041028.0–export-cf128 of=/dev/hde

     250368+0 records in250368+0 records out

   • On a Windows 2000 or Windows XP PC, use the Norton Ghost, dd, or physdiskwrite utility. The following example shows the use of physdiskwrite:
     C:\> physdiskwrite —u junos-jseries-7.0–20041028.0–export-cf512

     physdiskwrite v0.5 by Manuel Kasper 
           Searching for physical drives...
           Information for \\.\PhysicalDrive0:
           Windows: cyl: 2432
           tpc: 255
           spt: 63
           C/H/S: 16383/16/63
           Model: HITACHI_DK23DA-20
           Serial number: 123ABC
           Firmware rev.: 00J2A0G0
           Information for \\.\PhysicalDrive1:
           Windows: cyl: 125
           tpc: 255
           spt: 63
           Which disk do you want to write? (0..1) 1
           WARNING: that disk is larger than 800 MB! Make sure you're 
           not accidentally overwriting your primary hard disk!  
           Proceeding on your own risk...
           About to overwrite the contents of disk 1 with new data. 
           Proceed? (y/n) y
           511451136/511451136 bytes written in total

The copy process can take several minutes.

After copying the image to the compact flash disk, you can use it as the primary compact flash disk in any J-series Services Router. For installation instructions, see the J-series Services Router Getting Started Guide.