Board recovery

Hello everyone,

    I had a project being built from someone. I paid to develop this project and now that it is done we have been using it. But unfortunately i had a handshake agreement with him and paid for all the r&d he sold this project to anthor company with some minor tweaks to the web UI.Anyways im going to start somewhat over and will hire someone else. There was alot of data we used for volume calculations and many other variables to write the code.
  Long story short. I have thses boards but have no access to them. Is there a way i can login and get the code from these without having the user info?

TIA

This is a standard Linux recovery scenario.

Hook up a serial console and hit a key to go to the U-Boot menu when
the board boots. Add "init=/bin/bash" to the kernel command line.
You'll boot into an interactive prompt with root permissions and can
do anything you need: reset passwords, copy files, etc.

On Sat, 18 May 2019 20:02:03 -0700 (PDT), Kevin Krugielki
<thecarwashcompanyllc@gmail.com> declaimed
the following:

Long story short. I have thses boards but have no access to them. Is there a way i can login and get the code from these without having the user info?

  Lacking in a lot of information...

  WHICH boards? There are a few generations of BeagleBOARDs, a BeagleBONE
white, a few generations of BeagleBONE blacks, and spin-off (WiFi instead
of Ethernet, the blue, etc.)

  Are you running from eMMC or SD card? If you boot from whichever is not
the current running mode, can you gain access? {If the boards are running
from eMMC, you should be able to get a working SD card and boot from it}.
Once you have a booted system, MOUNT the other device (if booting from SD
card, mount the eMMC) -- then copy the passwd and shadow files from the
working OS to the mounted system (make backups of the original files -- in
case you need to recreate custom users). Unmount, remove SD card, reboot.
The passwd and shadow files should contain user/password data for a regular
board so you should now be able to log in.

My projects run on the black board. They dont use monitors while we are using them. I have it out and plugged into a monitor and powered on but nothing on the screen during boot or while on.

And they load from the board. There is no SD card being used.

Hi Kevin!

On Sun, 19 May 2019 20:28:34 -0700 (PDT), Kevin Krugielki
<thecarwashcompanyllc@gmail.com> declaimed
the following:

And they load from the board. There is no SD card being used.

  So install a current image on an SD card, plug it in, and boot to the
SD card (if the existing image is too old, you may need to use the "boot
switch/apply power" routine -- newer eMMC boot sequences will default to
the SD card if present).

  Once booted, mount the eMMC, and do whatever you need to it.

  From the previous post:

My projects run on the black board. They dont use monitors while we are
using them. I have it out and plugged into a monitor and powered on but
nothing on the screen during boot or while on.

  May just mean that they are running an IoT/Console-only version, with
no HDMI display driver enabled -- have you tried SSH to the board?