HPE MSA2040 Password Recovery / Factory Reset

I recently needed to reset the password on an HPE MSA2040 SAN to which I had physical access. It turns out this information was more difficult to find than I had presumed.

The often recommended action is to contact HPE who will send a engineer on-site to reset the MSA password/settings. Don’t hesitate to do that if you have an active support contract. However, here are the instructions for doing it yourself, without a call to support:

1. Connect to the MSA CLI interface over the USB serial port using putty, minicom or your preferred serial terminal emulator (see HPE documentation).
2. Hit enter to display to the MSA welcome banner and login prompt
3. Proceed to login with username restoredefaults and the serial number of the MSA module as the password
4. The controller will reboot to factory settings, albeit retaining the network (IP) configuration
5. Once the controller has rebooted, you can login with HPE default username manage and password !manage

Credit to the commentator on these pages whom provided the key information about the “secret” username and password combo to trigger the reset:

• http://virtualcloudzz.blogspot.ca/2015/05/HP-MSA-Default-Passwords_1.html
• https://www.helpowl.com/q/Hewlett-Packard/MSA1040/Technical-Support/hi-reset-password-msa-2040-misplaced-password/1023840