cisco 7970 recovery = possible?

Ta - didn't know about that one!

Now all I have after the headphone light etc light up, I get one of the line buttons flashing orange and the display never lights.

It doesnt seem to be looking for DHCP either?

The line buttons aren't flashing over and over - the first one comes on, then goes off, and then there is no more activity.

The port on my 3560 switch remains up, and I dont see any requests for DHCP come to dhcp turbo. I take it I've shafted it!

I can still do the reset as described above, but at the end of that procedure, it just seems to turn itself off as well, but the port remains up on the switch.

Gave up after a few hours - I doubt she's dead Jim :(

Once I do a factory reset I get the lights changing to red as descibed above, then the phone powers off, and every few minutes resets itself and doesnt send dhcp requests to my server

It's a brick. That's what 7970s do when they brick. If you see a bullseye on the bottom left hand corner, it's a brick.

Hi,

Most if not all can be recovered if you have the time to follow a few steps. Alot of people assume they are dead when in fact they are waiting on the correct environment to upgrade the firmware from.

The most common issue is when the screen goes blank and they see a line light (or not) then they assume it has given up. In fact the screen is dark - which looks dead - now if you have a phone in this state get a good torch and shine it into the screen - you'll see it is still doing something.

Now I have found that with bricked 7970s (and 71's) that under Windows with tftpd32 or Asterisk and all the right files nothing works properly and they sit there looking like a scrapper. However plugging said phone into a CCME box with the firmware loads for that phone model fixes them.

Now is this a Cisco to Cisco feature I am not sure but I have recovered a couple of "very" dead 7970s that were in limbo by plugging onto my CCME and they were upgraded and then visible to CCME.

Putting them back to the Asterisk machine they registered and worked. So if you can find someone with a CCME that has 7970 support (which most do) take the phone and PSU plug in and have a look/see. You might be surprised.

Also the torch trick was shown to me by someone much wiser than me who was commenting on why so many people condemn the 7970 as a brick in this situation. We paid $50 for one from eBay that was marked 'bricked after firmware upgrade', I have been using it now for about a year with no issues - shining the light onto the display showed it was again in limbo waiting for whatever they wait for.

In fact a cheap 1760 with CCME installed should do the trick and a useful workshop tool :-) I find they upgrade Cisco's much better than third party methods.

Regards,

Steve

Hi David,

No, you can load any valid firmware for the phone model. People have varying luck with different versions. But try an load an 8 at least version if you're starting.

Regards,

Steve

I've got a 7965. Tried the 349 sequence and am experiencing the same 'dead' looking symptoms. Running CME 7.0 on a 2811 with all the right firmeware being served up by the TFTP server (the router). In fact, I did a debug tftp events on the 2811 when the phone was first out of the box. I watched the phone and the debug info as the phone successfully downloaded the files it wanted. After that, the phone resets to the screen with a check in a checkbox to the lower left then resets again to the upgrading screen which errors out and resets the phone to the screen with the bullseye to the bottom left. Now I've god a seemingly bricked 7965. What's up?

Thank you Steve, thank you all for this post! I've had the same problem and solved it! yessss! :))

I have 7970 and did factory reset, which afterwards did not installed new firmware from Communication Manager 6.1 nor boot properly! I got the bulls eye! And after couple of restarts (123456789*0#) the phone was stuck at the black (blank) screen ! :(

After reading for two days on the internet how to solve this issue, I read this post and with the help of Communication Manager Express router i successfully brought the phone from plain brick! :))) Yess!

On short: Installed CME 4.1 and firmware SCCP files for 7970. Connected one Fast Ethernet port with the phone through cross-over cable (could have done it with straight-through also) and voila, the phone got the firmware and booted successfully !

Thank you once again!

Cheers,
Tiberie

I agree with evilb, I had 2 7970's that looked bricked I tried using the TFTP / DHCP server that came with trixbox however all I could see was the phone asking for term70.default.loads over and over. As a last resort I switched off my trixbox server and just used my windows PC with TFTP. Performed the hardware reset 3491672850*# and both phones sprang back into life.

I suffered with the bullseye in the left corner and the black screen and I had one of the phones do the 1st line flash amber trick mentioned above.

Follow the TFTPd route and you'll recover your phones.

Note: I could only get this to work using the contents of a cmterm 7970 .cop file using a cmterm 7970.zip would not work just got stuck on loading the term70.default.loads file which may explain the problem I had with the trixbox TFTP/DHCP.

Thank you for the great info. This thread is golden. Our office has about 12 7961 cisco phones that work. I have a few that are being difficult.

One of the phone, was connecting to dhcp, then showing the upgrading, then rebooting. I did the 3491672850#* and now it shows a blank screen, reboots, blank screen, reboots, etc. It is getting a IP address from DHCP still (hopefully a good sign). Been going on for over 30 minutes. I shined a flashlight on the screen and don't see anything.

Any ideas on how to to proceed?