topic Re: i2c bootup errors (PA200) in General Topics

i2c bootup errors (PA200)

hshawn — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 17:23:28 GMT

A friend of mine found a PA200 at a thrift store for $5.00 (without a power supply) I plugged it in today to see what state it was in and it looks like it had a rough life... All the guts are still inside and everything is clean and connected however it won't even get to the initial bootup MAINT prompt, anyone seen this before?

Sometimes I get this bootup, most of the time I get hex output to the screen and the "board will reset" message in an endless loop, and sometimes all interface lights light up. The MGT port lights up and gets traffic blinks but I seriously doubt it is usable at this stage (I do not see it getting or having an IP this early).

I am going to hand it back to him and tell him he has a nice paper weight at this point but curious if anyone has seen these errors before.

Re: i2c bootup errors (PA200)

jdelio — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 15:23:21 GMT

Lots of unsupported things in the bootup. did anyone mess with the memory?

I don't have one to check, but it looks like the memory is exceeding specs.. and therefore not booting properly.. But I cannot say for sure.

Re: i2c bootup errors (PA200)

hshawn — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 15:02:24 GMT

@jdelio Thank you! I don't ever think of that anymore but thanks to your post I was able to do some testing and link this to a bad stick of RAM. The device had to 2Gb DDR3 sticks in there for a 4Gb total, booting with the one 2Gb good stick resulted in it actually booting up but it would then shutdown and reboot over and over again. I popped an 8Gb stick in there and it boots up and is functional now. Not sure what the previous owner did but may have zapped the RAM sticks.

I was able to upgrade it from 7.1.4 to 7.1.24 but that's about all I can do without licenses. Unable to go past 8.x since I can't get app package to manually install Pretty sure there is still something else going on because it is fighting me on some things and likes to complain about not getting a config lock. I will keep poking at it for a bit and then just give it back to my friend and let him deal with it 🙂

Re: i2c bootup errors (PA200)

jdelio — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 15:43:38 GMT

@hshawn , that was great to find out that it WAS a memory issue.

Glad to hear you got it to boot and make it work..

But as far as updating, yeah, licensing can limit the functionality of it.

Manual PAN-OS upgrade may help.. but config lock issues..

Good Luck!