Small Town Geeks

There are many times when you find an old switch laying around and you may need to put it back in production but you may not remember any of the login information or maybe you never knew it. Lets walkthrough how to reset the configuration of a Cisco switch (2900 series in this case)

Connect your serial cable (rollover) to your switch and hit enter a few times.

After you verify connectivity unplug the device

Now hold the mode button and re-establish power to the switch.

Let go of the mode button when the light on port1 goes off.

Connect your terminal program to the switch and you should see :

The system has been interrupted prior to initializing the flash file system to finish
loading the operating system software:

flash_init
load_helper
boot
switch:

Type in flash_init

You will now see text flash by that talks about the flash file system after its is complete

enter load_helper command

After it is complete (it only takes a second) type dir flash: (Make sure you type the colon after flash.

you will now see the contents of the flash: directory including the file we are looking for which is call config.text this has all the old settings in it that we need to get rid of (Including passwords and such)

To get rid of the file we are going to rename it by issuing the rename flash:config.text flash:config.old make sure you enter all of the colons for this line of code.

now enter the boot command and you will be on your way.

make sure that you do remember to save your running config to your startup config by entering copy run start

This process has saved me a lot of time in the passed. I hope it works for you.

Until next time,

Carpe Noctum.

T.J. Houston