ISP managed Cisco 1720 break disabled?

I recently had an interview with an ISP and they said they did this as a matter of course. I've no info on it though. Could you change the flash memory?

Its possible to do, but most consultants/ISPs that I've dealt with wouldn't do so (well, probably most that I've met don't know about undocumented commands such as this either).

Of course, there's also some weird people out there that do things to annoy the hell out of their own customers if they try to leave, burn all the bridges and be way vengeful for leaving.

I believe that people have said that they've resorted to some tricks to get around it, but I don't know what they've had to do. The most straight forward would be to find the config Flash chip and replace it/reprogram it, but that takes a surface mount solder station usually, the config is stored on a seperate chip than the file system flash.

Re-programming chips? Soldering? Sigh....I guess I basically have a useless 1720 if the ISP made this hardware change.

I have to see if I can find replacement flash and try to replace it.

Thank you for the help!

Search groupstudy.com on how you *may* be able to overcome this.

I popped out the flash and booted the router. Since the router couldn't find the flash card, it went right into rommon. I changed the config register and was able to change the password.

It was all too easy. Thank you all for the help and sorry for not figuring that out myself.