A password recovery method I've found very frustrating is to use the serial number or similar value that's on a label on the bottom of the equipment. It's just fine for desktop hardware - but for rack-mounted gear, it's not uncommon to find out that you need this information *after* somebody's racked and stacked the hardware, and therefore you either need to unscrew it (if it was screwed into the rack) or drag it out (if it wasn't screwed in for some reason like missing wing-brackets or 23-inch telco racks or random junk piled on top of it, etc.), and possibly uncable it as well, depending on how much slack is in the cabling, and you almost certainly want to power it down first, and you need to have enough flashlights and reading glasses to deal with reading the bottom of the equipment lying down on the floor of the data center. Yes, you *should* be able to find the serial number by looking in the accurate complete up-to-date spreadsheet of equipment inventory records, or at least the previous-user-printed Dymo-label on the front of the box. But if you had that quality of records, you probably wouldn't need to be running password recovery anyway. (Disclaimer: I'm currently working in a development lab, not operations, so ideally this doesn't reflect the state of our production data centers :-) Most of the time it doesn't reflect our lab either, but occasionally it does, and of course loaner equipment often arrives in random condition.