forgotten Admin Password

[Ron]

Question of the day seems to be how to recover or perhaps
rewrite the Administrator Account. Is there any way to do
this short of a clean install?


Thank You for you time, Ron

 

[Tom S]

If you have a second account that is a member of the
adminitrator group I believe you can do this. But only
maybe with XPPro. ( don't know if available in home
edition of xp.) Try opneing adminstrative tools under
control panel. Select local users and groups - select
users - there should be a list of all available users on
the computor there. Select the one that was the
adminstrative account the password is lost from and right
click it. Hit set passowrd and follow the prompts. take
note of prompts as action that will happen upon changing
or restting password. Maybe this will work - T.Savage 2003
www.savage-art.com Good Day to ya !

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Ron;
The password is Case Sensitive.
Check Caps Lock and try various of Capital combinations.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=321305
Or
Reboot to Safe Mode, select Administrator, leave password blank.
Then go to User Accounts in Control Panel.
Select the user and change the password.
If you are using Windows XP Pro and have encrypted data, you may
permanently lose access to the encrypted data.

Here are other options:
http://www.wininternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/index.asp
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/product.cfm?id=265&affid=wxpnews

Another option is to install Windows XP on another partition and take
Ownership of your data.
You could also perform another installation on the same partition,
although this is not a permanent fix and it is recommended to perform
a Clean Installation after retrieving your data.

After this is resolved, take precautions to not lose the password.

 

[A. Nonymous]

If you are not afraid of command-line (in Linux!), take a
look at
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
This Linux bootdisk has NTFS drivers and software to
change password for any account in in SAM. It did work for
me but your mileage may vary. In the worst case scenario
though you would have to do an "upgrade" install (or clean
install) so if you are considering this option anyway, why
not give it a try?
You WILL lose all encrypted data (if any) that was
encrypted by administrator. MS have done the right thing
there and to get a cryptographic key you need an original
password.