I have recently been building a number of devices as well as reconfiguring some old devices form stores. One of the issues in reusing pre-configured devices is that you may not know the password. Easy you say if these are Cisco devices just following the password recovery procedure by going into ROMMON. You are right however first I need to send a break sequence during the boot up of the device!
The device in question happened to be in a remote data centre with only terminal server access, I could get the device power cycled so had to work out how I could send the break sequence via terminal server.
It turns out this is pretty easy (almost as easy as password recovery). First of all connect to terminal server console for the device using the Windows Telnet utility and then at the correct moment press CTRL+] and then you should be displayed with the following;
You can then type ‘send brk’ and then hit return. When you hit return again it should go back to the original screen and then hay-presto you should enter into ROMON>