Cisco IOS Password Recovery

Submitted by cliff on Fri, 19/03/2004 - 11:01

This post is a legacy post from my old weblog, it has been included as it seems to still have some hits. Old comments are included

This weblog was intended primarily to have an easy way to type my documents and to make them searchable commentable etc..

After looking at my webservers webstatistics, I saw some search requests for Cisco password recovery techniques. Well then let's explain it here for everyone to read:

1) Attach a console cable to the Cisco
2) Reboot the Cisco
3) When the Cisco shows the first sign of life start sending it breaks (that's ctrl-F in minicom)
4) type confreg 0x2142
5) type reset
6) ... Cisco boots .... zZzZzZ ....
7) Enter no at the first question
8) voila a configless Cisco
9) now get into enable mode (but do NOT type conf term)
10) type copy startup running
11) voila a running cisco with full config in ENABLE mode
12) do your password changing stuff
13) type write mem
14) type config-register 0x2102 in configure mode
15) type reload

That was quite easy huh :)

This guide will grant you ACCESS to an enable prompt on a running router. It will NOT recover the actual password!


Only one comment:

I want to recover cisco 3600 router password, i have configuration file, password is encrypted.
Ramesh - 11 April '04 - 11:06