Cisco Switch not working?

So, a couple of days ago I got some old equipment in to mess around with. I got 4 bases, 3 hubs, and 1 cisco Catalyst 2950 series 24 port switch.

I've been wanting some cisco hardware to mess around with for a while, so I was pretty excited. I have no clue about cisco hardware, so I figured I'd just plug it in and go from there. Anyways, when I plug it in, all the leds flash green once, then the syst led comes on amber and the stat led blinks green a few times, then the stat led goes off completely and the util led comes on green for a few seconds, then the syst led starts blinking green and it does that indefinitely. The syst led is on and amber the whole time until it starts blinking green. I haven't found anything online so far about the syst led blinking green, so I was hoping someone here might know of something I can do to revive this thing. I assume it's old because everything from where I get this stuff is old. So perhaps it's just dead. But I'm hoping that's not the case. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

greetings h3r3tic...

There's a hardware guide HERE . Just about any bit of Cisco documentation you could want is available online.

Unfortunately, it sounds like there's a problem with the switch. If you can connect a console cable to it and watch through Hyperterminal / Tera Term / etc while it's booting, you might be able to get some idea of what exactly is broken.

Yeah, I'm going to get some stuff today. I'm either going to make or buy a rollover cable, and I also need an rj-45 to DB-9 converter. Then I will be able to connect to the console and, like you said, maybe see what's going wrong. I think other than that there's nothing I can do. It's probably dead. Thanks.

great news. After a few trips to altex and lots of help from the people of #cisco on freenode IRC, the switch is up and running. After a few tries of making my own rj-45 to db-9 converter, I ended up borrowing one from my professor. So with that and the rollover cable I made I was finally able to connect to the console to see what was going on. The problem was that there was no IOS on the switch. no boot image at all. Who sends someone a cisco switch without the software? Anyways, the people on freenode helped me find the version I needed, and I followed a guide to get that going. 1 hour and 5 minute transfer for the 3 MB image over a serial connection :P. Then someone walked me through configuring it, and all was pretty much good except that I still didn't have my own rj-45 to db-9 converter. So I finally got one made today that works on the third overall try again with the help of someone on freenode :P. All is good now. Sorry if you didn't care, but I thought I'd share anyway. Thanks.

Good to hear you got it all working :)

Just a tip.. In the bootloader you can configure it's interfaces and assign it an ip.. Use tftp to transfer the IOS, it's a lot faster ;)

Scratch that.. I just checked.. I was thinking of the tinyrom of a 803.. on a 2950 you can increase the baudrate though,, 9600 is a pretty ancient speed..