Windows 2000 Professional User Password Reset or By-Pass

[Mark Tirpak]

I'm a volunteer with the Boys & Girls Club of the
Northern Cheyenne Nation in Lame Deer, MT -
www.ncbgclub.org -
and we are having difficulty with one of our computers
running Windows 2000 Professional.
A former employee has left us without the user password
she created, and we have no idea how to reset it or by-
pass it.

There's data on the computer that we really want access
to, and we bought a copy of Windows 2000 Profressional to
replace the copy of the software that we had lost.
Unfortunately, the software we purchased does not provide
us with the support service we need to get past the
password. Looking through the Microsoft support site,
there's lots of talk of an administrative password. We
have no idea what that password might be.

I'm a basic computer user, and would really appreciate
any step by step solutions you can provide. Thank you
for your help!

Mark Tirpak,

Volunteer
Boys & Girls Club of the Northern Cheyenne Nation

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Hi Mark.

If the computer is using fat32 file system you can boot from a boot floppy
and run this command [ del c:\winnt\system32\config\sam ] assuming drive C
is the system drive. After a reboot, you can log on as administrator with no
password meaning blank, empty password.

If that does not work, you have the option of putting the hard drive in
another computer running W2K/XP to copy off the needed data. You may have to
logon as an administrator and take ownership of the folders if first denied
access. Note that if the files are encrypted via EFS you will not be able to
access them from another operating system.

The link below is to a free download that can reset the built in
administrator account to null/blank and is handy to have as another
alternative. good luck. --- Steve

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm

 

[Guest]

Mark, as Steve noted if the c:\ drive was setup as FAT then the procedure he outlined works fine. If it is setup as NTFS which to me is more typical of W2K installations, then you will need the NTFSDOS utility from WINTERNALS which provides the means to boot from a dos diskette and then allows you to take the same actions that Steve identified. WINTERNALS wizard steps you through the NTFSDOS diskette creation process. There is a cost for NTFSDOS which is well worth it. Searching Google for Universal Boot Disk (or UBD) will provide you with a "tool" that has similiar functionality for free....however AFAIK the source is not verifiable and depending on where you get it, could be more problems than it's worth, especially if you need specific steps.

 

[bufster]

hi, you are having exactly the same problem as me i dont
know my admin password,i have been told that i have to
uninstall windows and reinstall it,(reboot) and thats the
only way to get around the problem, to me thats a pretty
scary thing to do,and i dont know what stuff you will lose
either, sorry i cant help more