administrator password

[Guest]

I had someone set an Administrator password and now has forgotten it. Is
there a way to override and reset the password??

 

[Kurt]

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

....kurt

 

[Guest]

Thanks - have you tried this before??

Jenn

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

....kurt

 

[Kurt]

You bet. It's in my toolbox! Although the disclaimer will warn you that
there is some risk, it has worked every time for me. If you search the
archives of related newsgroups you'll find many posts hailing the benefits
of this software. When you boot the CD, you'll be booting a very lightweight
Linux install. It will mount your hard drive, locate your %systemroot% and
present you with a dozen or so prompts asking what you want to do. I suggest
just hitting "Enter" at each prompt until the last two or three. If you do
you'll accept the defaults, which will blank the administrator password (you
can choose any user, and it will list them for you, but I'd go with the
defaults). At the end, you have to enter some keypresses to get it to
actually write the info to your hard drive, then there are a couple of "are
you reall really sure" type prompts. After it finishes, you'll just find
yourself in a Linux Shell. You can just eject the CD and reboot. Log on as
administrator with no password.

....kurt

 

[Guest]

Thanks I will try it Monday- one of the concerns is that it encrypted files -
I don't have any files under the administrator I need to worry about but the
other users - will it encrypt any of those?

 

[Kurt]

That is certainly a concern. I would say that as long as you don't modify
users accounts that have encrypted files, you should be safe. If you wanted
to be sure, you could have those users copy the files to a temporary holding
area (unencrypted), then either transfer them back if there'a a problem,
or - more likely - delete them when everything proves to be ok. Probably
would be easier than exporting the certs. This is a good time to create a
backdoor account with full admin rights in case this ever happens again.
Also, if you allow encrypted files (visibly shudders), you should definitely
have a backup of the certs. If anything should happen where you lose or
corrupt your security accounts info, those files are absolutely gone
forever.

....kurt