Managing Configuration Register

All Cisco routers have a 16-bit software register that’s written into NVRAM. By default, the configuration register is set to load the Cisco IOS from flash memory and to look for and load the startup-config file from NVRAM. In the following sections, I am going to discuss the configuration register settings and how to use these settings to provide password recovery on your routers.

Understanding the Configuration Register Bits

The 16 bits (2 bytes) of the configuration register are read from 15 to 0, from left to right. The default configuration setting on Cisco routers is 0x2102. This means that bits 13, 8, and 1 are on, as shown in Table 7-2. Notice that each set of 4 bits (called a nibble) is read in binary ...

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