Anyways as the story goes when circuit city shutdown i purchased the fire dog switch from behind my bench for 100bucks its a Cisco Catalyst 2950 24port 10/100. My problem lies within the circuit city config on the switch. It has some welcome message blah blah about a 10k fine if you break there internal network yadah yadah. So anyways i fallowed the password reset instructions on the cisco site Im using puTTY to console in over a roll over cable and rj-45 to db-9 adapter.

Now my main problem is with the reset steps located here. Cisco Catalyst Fixed Configuration Layer 2 and Layer 3 Switches - Cisco Systems

I get all the way through step 8 ok and then when i try to do the boot command to boot the image i get this output.

switch: boot
Loading "word"...word: permission denied

Error loading "word"

Interrupt within 5 seconds to abort boot process.
Boot process failed...

when i should get this output.

switch: boot
Loading "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC7.bin"...###############################
################################################## ##############################
################################################## ####################
File "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC7.bin" uncompressed and installed, entry po
int: 0x3000
executing...

This has been driving me crazy for months i dont under stand where everything is going wrong if anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated.

i did allot of work with those model switches when i worked for Philips medical division. it sounds to me like there's something corrupt in the works somewhere. Do you have the original (default) config that you can load and wipe out all previous settings?

a factory reset doesn't always reset everything, which is why I ask. I may have one of our old config files sitting around, will have to look after work.

another possibility, though i doubt relevant in this case, but Cisco is pretty stern about how things work and get accessed. it's possible that the switch may not like putty, try using a hyperterminal session and see if that gets you any further.

I actually just got it going late last night What happend was i had bought this switch from circuit city and it had about 3-4 config files so when i renamed the config.text it didnt help any but anyways i did a dir:flash command then renamed all there config files rebooted the switch and it brought me to a setup wizard so i got to build a new config from there =D.