How I brought my Cisco 7961G Back to Life

This is how I brought my Cisco 7961G back to life.  Many hours later but here are my notes.

I used TFTpd32 as my tftpd software but I wasn’t having any luck with the DHCP piece for the 1 of my 2 7961G phones.  Prior to this last brick I had at one point been successful with a flash to SIP but then the next test it failed and I was back to square one.

In a nutshell:

  • I had to set both option 66 and option 150 to the ip address.  I made sure that the name included “”
  • I took the handset off the phone.  Weird.  I know but it was on the Cisco site as a possibility.
  • I used my router for the DHCP server and Tftpd for the tftp server and as the dns server
  • That Hex stuff..didn’t work
  • I used the firmware from the file called cmterm-7941-7961-sccp.8-0-3.zip
  • I added an XMLDefault.cnf.xml file and changed the one line inside it

My next challenge is to get it upgraded.