Cisco Catalyst 9200 Factory Reset

I recently inherited as pallet of Cat 9200Ls from a customer who shutdown one of their offices. Many of them had existing configuration and were part of a stack previously. As far as I can tell the ROMMON mode on these switches doesn’t give you the ability to delete the existing configuration files. Here is how you have to work around that.

First boot the switch. Once ########### starts scrolling across the terminal press the button on the front of the switch. This will break the boot into ROMMON mode.

Once in ROMMON mode you need to paste in three commands:

switch: SWITCH_IGNORE_STARTUP_CFG=1
switch: unset STACK_1_1
switch: boot

This should be all that is needed to ignore the existing configuration and boot into a blank configuration. Once booted into a blank configuration:

enable
write erase
switch X renumber 1
conf t
no system ignore startupconfig switch all
do write memory
do reload

Renumbering the switch and reloading will both present prompts.

After the switch as rebooted it should be in a usable factory default state.