Recover a Cisco 6000 series switch using a USB drive

This article provides the procedure to recover Cisco 6000 series switches using a USB drive. If a switch encounters issues, such as becoming unresponsive and remaining stuck at the login screen, recovery is essential to restore its functionality. This process involves reloading the switch with a Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric OS image that includes an updated agent.

Supported hardware and software versions

USB recovery is available only on select BIOS versions. To confirm compatibility, check the BIOS version displayed in the banner after the system reboots.

Supported hardware model and minimum BIOS versions

Hardware model

Minimum BIOS version

HF6100-32D

15.03

HF6100-60L4D

5.08

Prerequisites for preparing the USB recovery drive and recovering the switch

Prerequisites for preparing the USB drive

Ensure you have these items for USB drive preparation.

  • Third-party software that enables you to create a bootable image on a USB drive. Free, open-source utilities, such as Rufus and balenaEtcher, are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can be downloaded from the internet.
  • USB drive with at least 32GB of capacity and support for USB 3.0.
  • Download the specific Cisco 6000 series switch recovery image (.tar) from the Cisco Software Download site and extract these files:
    • Cisco 6000 series switch model recovery file:
      • SONiC.202405c.2.1.1-0.HF6100-32D.img
      • SONiC.202405c.2.1.1-0.HF6100-60L4D.img
    • readme.txt (contains the MD5 checksum for verifying file integrity)

Prerequisite for recovering the switch

Before you recover the switch using the prepared USB drive, make sure all switches in the same fabric are running version 20250828. If the fabric is not running 20250828, then you must upgrade the fabric (see Software lifecycle management).

Prepare the USB recovery drive

Follow these steps to create a bootable USB drive.

Step 1

Attach the USB drive to your computer and confirm the device is connected.

Step 2

Use the third-party utility to create a bootable USB drive from the .img recovery image for the platform that you are recovering. Available recovery images for supported platforms include:

  • SONiC.202405c.2.1.1-0.HF6100-32D.img to recover a HF6100-32D switch
  • SONiC.202405c.2.1.1-0.HF6100-60L4D.img to recover a HF6100-60L4D switch

Step 3

Safely eject the USB drive from your computer.

The USB drive is now ready to be used to recover a Cisco 6000 series switch.

Recover the switch using the prepared USB drive

Follow these steps to recover a Cisco 6000 series switch using the USB drive.

Step 1

Make sure that the fabric where you plan to recover the switch is running software version 20250828.

You can identify the running software version in Nexus Hyperfabric by selecting the fabric and clicking Software management. If the fabric is not running 20250828, upgrade the fabric (see Software lifecycle management).

Fabric software version

Fabric software version

Step 2

Insert the prepared USB drive into the switch.

See the specific Cisco 6000 series switch model documentation to locate the USB port. Supported switch models include:

Step 3

Power cycle the switch to initiate the recovery process.

  1. During the recovery, confirm that the BIOS version matches or exceeds the minimum required version for the switch model listed in Supported hardware and software versions. For example:

    Cisco HyperFabric 6000 Series BIOS Ver 15.03 Primary
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1530 @ 2.40GHz
Cisco Confidential
Board Type 0x107 PID HF6100-32D Serial FLM282802DA
X86FPGA 1.89.0 TamLib 5.01.01
Booting from USB

  2. During the recovery process, the system locates and installs the Cisco 6100 series switch image.

    Installing recovery image

    Installing recovery image
     Note

    The system automatically selects the required options during the boot process. Do not interrupt the recovery sequence until the start screen in the next step appears.

  3. The start screen appears, confirming successful installation and recovery.

    Start screen

    Start screen

  4. After the switch has successfully booted from the USB drive, log into the switch with the default credentials:

    • Username: ttg-admin
    • Password: hfabric2025

Step 4

If the recovered switch has an internet connection through its out-of-band (OOB) management ethernet interface, use the Change Configuration option in the main console to restore the lost internet access configuration.

Step 5

Remove the USB drive from the switch after recovery.

 Note

If you forget to remove the USB drive, the switch will continue to boot from the USB drive and go through the recovery procedure again after each reboot.