Bricking a firewall?

[tyler]

Ok, I am not surprised in life that an upgrade can go wrong.  Happens on many different technologies.  But I recently had my over $60k PA5220 firewall brick going from 17.x to 18.x.  And that was after getting advice from PA support before doing the upgrade to try and avoid a problem.  

  It amazes me that there is no reliable factory reset function to allow us a path to recover instead of having to wait up to 24 hours for a replacement which now becomes serious downtime.  There was no bad hardware.  The system upgrade process was so corrupt that all factory reset options would not work.  This seems crazy to me.   The whole point of a factory reset method should override anything that might occur to corrupt the system.  Why can't a true reliable factory reset option not be available?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I have read that others have faced this same problem.  So this is not a one off.  PA needs some serious engineering modifications to this process.  It can't be in PA's interest to have these experiences either.   

  Tim

[BPry]

@tyler 

I'm going to assume that you upgraded from 7.1 to 8.1, because 17.x and 18.x aren't a thing. The thing you have to keep in mind with this big of a jump, is that you are effectively removing the biggest protection that PAN has included for something like this with the two separate partitions. If you go through the proper upgrade process from 7.1 to 8.1, by the time you are on the target release both partitions have been overwritten from the "working" release multiple times. 

What upgrade path did TAC have you follow?