Password recovery on Cisco Router – config register

This is just a quick post for my reference on how to do password recovery on a Cisco Router. Recently I had to do it on a Cisco 1841. Here are my steps:

Boot up the router with a console cable and then from terminal emulation software hit pause/break
Router will get to ““ prompt
Type confreg 0x2142
Next prompt ““
Type reset
Once the router reloads it will not have a password.

First thing I like to do is right away run the following commands other wise if I reboot the router it will continue to go back to the default settings and nothing will be saved.

config t
!
config-register 0x2102