Booting a Cisco router from TFTP when the flash: has died

 Recently i had a 3825 router which failed to come back up after a power-down, reason was that the Compact Flash card had died. :(

This left us in a bit of a pickle and i needed to get this backup ASAP.. Solution in this case was to get the router booted from TFTP, lucky in this case i had a serial console on the device.

So at ROMMON i did this:

rommon> IP_ADDRESS=10.1.0.10
rommon> IP_SUBNET_MASK=255.255.255.0

rommon> DEFAULT_GATEWAY=10.1.0.1
rommon> TFTP_SERVER=10.0.0.12
rommon> TFTP_FILE=/tftpboot/c3825-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T2.bin

rommon> tftpdnld

! image loads and router comes up with a config which was fortunately save to nvram: which was not affected.