Cisco Router Password Recovery

How to Password Recovery on Cisco Routers?

There are several reasons to recover a router’s enable password. For example you can forget the password or somebody might give a password that you don’t know. So, to reach your router’s or switch’s command line interface, you should recover this password. In this lesson, we will focus on Cisco Password Recovery.

During your access and Cisco Password Recovery, it is important that recovering the password without loosing any configuration. To recover a Cisco router’s, switch’s enable password, do the followings:

1) For Cisco Password Recovery, firstly we will prevent the IOS load at the beginning. For this during startup use CTRL+BREAK (CTRL+C). By doing this, we will enter the rommon mode. By the way rommon mode is a limited operating system on router.

2) In Rommon mode we will change the configuration-register. To do this, write “o/r 0×2142” command. By entering this command we prevent the router to load the configuration on NVRAM.

3) Here, shutdown the router. This time, because of the fact that our configuration wasn’t been loaded, IOS will ask us if we think to buld a new configuration.Our answer will be No. After that the default command line

router>

will appear.

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4-) In command line write enable, and this time we will enter the enable mode without password.

Then, what about our old configuration? The old configuration is still in NVRAM.We are now in running-config.

5-) To reload our old configuration, we will copy the configuration in startup-config to the running-config. For this use the following command:

Now we save the old configuration.

6-) Now we will determine a new enable password. To do this we must be in configuration mode. Use configure terminal command, after that to determine a new enable password, use the following command:

7-) After this step, we must go back to the enable mode with exit and then we must save the configuration that works on RAM to the NVRAM. This is for not to loose the configuration after the reboot of the router. To achieve this use the following commad:

With the above step, we complete the copy process.We both save the old configuration and recover the enable secret password. Here there is a last step. We must change the configuration register to the beginning value.

8-)To do this, we must go the configuration mode and use the configuration-register 0×2102 command.

After this last step, if we reboot the router, we can work with our old configuration and new enable password. We have completed Cisco Password Recovery.