Forgotten admin password and a Fortiswitch 224d-poe

sup all

so i’ve been working with a fortiswitch 224d-poe at home for a while when the thing went bat shit on me. When i tried to access the admin console i realized that i had forgotten the password. Below are the steps i used for wiping switch back to factory default with latest (as of time of writing) firmware.

first things first, make sure that you have a properly pinned console cable :

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then set up a tftp server. i used tftp-hpa in a non-daemonized mode since i only needed it for one time usage.

next restart the switch with console. i did this below:
sorry for the awful pics but it was 0400 in the morning when i did this

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since the default and data2 partitions were formatted and saved as default, this caused the factory default settings to be enabled.

once this was done:

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and voila. back to defaults and regained access to the switch.