Still between a rock and a hard place

a.ford · ‎06-09-2003

This is the problem:

1. I have a 4500 router thats been flashed with 2600 IOS

2. I need to do password recovery.

Issue at hand. After reading through the site, the recommendation is to boot from ROM (which has the correct IOS image) to deal with the flash issue. But at that point I don't have the password. I can't boot from flash (to recover the passwrod) because of the incorrect IOS in flash.

Am I between a rock and a hard place?

vincent-n · ‎06-09-2003

Hi there

Looks like you're still between a rock and a hard place alright. Anyway:

First - boot into ROM (as you did before) and specify config register of 0xYYY1. The usual values for YYY are 210 (I've just checked with my router). The value 1 will ask the router to boot into RXBoot. From this RXBoot, you'll end up with an IOS that "looks" like a full feature IOS but it's not. It's enough for you to specify IP addresses so you can use TFTP to upload new IOS.

If you cannot boot into RXBoot as specified above then you'll have to go into ROM and upload the IOS via XModem or YModem. This method is obviously a lot slower than TFTP.

This link http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/access/acs_fix/cis2000/c2000qs/22812.htm will show some information on config register.

Second - Read the following information from http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/474/pswdrec_4500.shtml which details how to recover a lost password.

Good luck.