Password Recovery for Switches
With the arrival of the 3524 switch, I ran into the first situation where I had to reset the password on a switch. I have performed this process in the past on routers, but even the CCNA book I have did not cover the process on switches. The process is quite different when compared to the password recovery procedure on a router.
Cisco calls this process password recovery, as opposed to a password reset. The goal is to maintain the current configuration on the device, in this case a switch, while allowing you to reset the PrivilegeEXEC and Telnet passwords to something you can remember. In my case, I skipped the last few steps in the Cisco process since I was not concerned with saving the configuration on the switch.
This is a good page to bookmark, since you will likely encounter a situation where you purchase a used switch that will have a password set by someone else.