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Catalyst 2900 Series XL and Catalyst 3500 Series XL Software Configuration Guide
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Chapter 9 Troubleshooting
Recovery Procedures
Recovering from a Lost or Forgotten Password
Follow the steps in this procedure if you have forgotten or lost the switch password.
Step 1
Connect a terminal or PC with terminal emulation software to the console port. For more information,
refer to the switch installation guide.
Note
You can configure your switch for Telnet by following the procedure in the
“Accessing the CLI”
section on page 3-7
.
Step 2
Set the line speed on the emulation software to 9600 baud.
Step 3
Unplug the switch power cord.
Step 4
Press the Mode button, and at the same time, reconnect the power cord to the switch.
You can release the Mode button a second or two after the LED above port 1X goes off. Several lines of
information about the software appear, as do instructions:
The system has been interrupted prior to initializing the flash file system. The following
commands will initialize the flash file system, and finish loading the operating system
software:
flash_init
load_helper
boot
Step 5
Initialize the Flash file system:
switch: flash_init
Step 6
If you had set the console port speed to anything other than 9600, it has been reset to that particular
speed. Change the emulation software line speed to match that of the switch console port.
Step 7
Load any helper files:
switch: load_helper
Step 8
Display the contents of Flash memory:
switch: dir flash:
The switch file system is displayed:
Directory of flash:
2 -rwx 843947 Mar 01 1993 00:02:18 C2900XL-h-mz-112.8-SA
4 drwx 3776 Mar 01 1993 01:23:24 html
66 -rwx 130 Jan 01 1970 00:01:19 env_vars
68 -rwx 1296 Mar 01 1993 06:55:51 config.text
1728000 bytes total (456704 bytes free)
Step 9
Rename the configuration file to config.text.old.
This file contains the password definition.
switch: rename flash:config.text flash:config.text.old