Physical access prevention is the most basic key to any security measure for switches. Without physical security all other security measures are pretty much irrelevant. Simply put a hammer or dumping a cup of water on the switch to causes problems is a lot easier.
Therefore you must have physical access to any vendors switch to recover password. It cannot not be done over the LAN via telnet, ssh etc.
Assuming no one configured a boot rom password you can do the following. If they did create a bootrom passowrd and you don't know that either then your toast and can't recover the password.
Connect via Hyperterm to the Serial Console port (RJ45)
On boot you will see a message for about 5 seconds that allows you to boot into the bootrom by using the key combo of CTRL or something similar
In the bootmenu you can boot with no config file. You may need to fish through the menus to find it. But when you do, select this and when the unit comes up it will be at factory defaults no password no config etc.
As soon as you login use the DIR command and see what the current config file names is
then give the unit an IP address and copy the config file to a TFPT/FTP server.
Edit the file and remote any user info entries i.e admin and save it with a different name so its less confusing later on.
TFTP/FTP the edited file back to the switch.
There is a command to tell the switch what config file to use when booting ( don't remmeber it off the top of my head but it is documented in one of the manuals)
Use this command to point to the new file. Then reboot again as normal.
when the switch comes back up it should have the original conig running again ( minus user/passwords of course. The create new user/password info.
Make sure to save the config using the "save" command after creating the new user/password stuff.
Then you should be all set.
