fortigate advance reformat and install

Sometime in our fortigate firewalls, we develop issues with the image and flash storage. In this post we will look at a FWF60B and the recovering and restoring the image on the internal flash storage.

1st if  your firewall boots with the following error or any errors or just flat out don't boot;

This is a good sign or bad things ahead. But have no fear we can recover.

2nd, you will need to  pull the power cord and interrupt the boot process & reinstall and/or format

note:  here we will  reformat and then install a fresh image into the flash using TFTP-server. It will require that you have access to fortinet support for downloading the appropiate image

https://support.fortinet.com/login/UserLogin.aspx

Okay so let's reformat and install our new image;

tftp-server = located at 192.168.1.168
fortigate =  temporary configured at .188
netmask  = /24
image = FWF_60B-v400-buildXXXX-FORTINET.out ( xxxx =  the version build )

Okay that's simple. And as you can see  the unit will validate the  image and reboot the firewall after the recovering.

Lastly, if you suspect  hardware issues;  Fortinet provides a diagnostic image that  you can download and BOOT and run extended  diagnostics. These images are known as  HQIP and once again, require access to support @ fortinet.

http://emea.fortinet.net/fortinet/aht/index.php

So if you suspect hardware issues, grab the HQIP file for your model and run the diagnostics & before reinstalling the image.


Ken Felix
Freelance Network/Security Engineer

kfelix ----a--t----socpuppets ---.---com


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