Cisco 7960 P003AM Problem
Problem Description
As some of you may know if you buy a Cisco 7960 from Ebay or from another second hand source, you can end up with a phone that has a P003AM730 firmware load. This load is to my knowledge the default load from the factory, unfortunately it has several bugs. One of these bugs is that it will not download a new firmware file bigger than 384k. This makes it very difficult to convert these phones to SIP because most SIP loads are much larger. Another bug/feature is that it will only upload firmware that adheres to an old naming convention.
Prerequisites
There is a way to work through this problem, this is how I did it. First I had the following files available to me P0S3-7-4-00.bin which is the 7.4 SIP load, and P003-7-4-00.bin which is the universal application loader that goes with it. Contrary to what some forums will tell you XMLDefault.cnf.xml will not work with P003AM730, you must use OS79XX.TXT. But do keep the xml file for later.
Solution
1) Rename P003-7-4-00.bin to P0S30740.bin, and put P0S30740 at the top of your OS79XX.TXT. You are basically renaming the application loader to the SIP image name and shortening it to the naming convention that will work with this particular load. This will have the effect of fooling the phone into loading the UAL.
2) If everything goes right you the application loader will load and the phone will reboot.
3) You can now use your XMLDefault.cnf.xml file or OS79XX.TXT file to load the appropriate SIP load P0S3-7-4-00.bin.
4) If everything goes right you should have an unprovisioned SIP load.
There are many combinations of the same problem posted on many forums, so if this doesn’t work for you and you find some thing that does post it here.
One last thing, Cisco makes good gear and thats why we all use it, but they are one of the worst customer support companies ever. If I had to write a manual on how not to treat customers I couldn’t come up with half the stuff they pull. And please, please make your firmware available for download, or at the very least if we have to buy a support contract make it easy for us to do so! Cisco rant now over.
Phone System 