question mark in enable password

[Petr]

Hi I accidentally put a question mark into enable password without preceding it by crtl v. Now we are lock out of the enable part of ios.

Is there a way to recover the password? It must have changed to something different than '?' 

Thank you for any help.

[Martin L]

There are password recovery document for  your device; what is it: switch or router?  you can search for "password recovery" on line. basically, you must get into a ROMMON (switch) mode of a device to change booting option; aka tell device to skip loading start up config.  If this is home lab, you can just erase start up config text file from flash ( but do not erase IOS! ) and reboot device.

Otherwise, if you want to keep start-up  configs but remove password from it,  You must follow recovery step by step from password recovery document for your device.  

Regards, ML
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[Petr]

Hi Martin,
Thanks for the reply. It is a switch 3850. I now the password recovery procedure with a console cable. I was hoping for something less destructive than that, preferably without an outage. Also, I don't particularly fancy driving one hour to a different city to resolve this via console cable.

Is there any procedure where I can do it remotely?
Regards
Petr

[balaji.bandi]

If the device is not written or saved config, ask one of the remote team to reboot the device - so you can login back - if the write command issued - then password recovery required the device to go offline and from the console, you can recover it, there is no other way to do it for now.

always suggested working remotely more cautious than console. since you need to check command syntax before pasting.