Maria wrote on 24-Oct-2004 2:45 PM:
My son forgot his account password. He is the only account in his computer.
He has XP. We have no hint, no password recover disk. What can we do? Is
there anything else to do?
Sure there is. You can go to the logon screen in XP Pro and press
Ctl-Alt-Del twice and enter "Administrator" and the password (may be
blank). In Home, press F8 after the BIOS screen at boot and logon to
safe mode. If he also forgot the password to the Administrator account
and it isn't blank, then you will have to either re-install or create a
password reset CD, boot to that CD, and set the Administrator password.
There is a utility on the Internet called "ntpasswd" that can do this.
Then go to the User Accounts control panel and change the password for
your son's account. If your son was using encrypted files, this will
disable access to them and he will have to recover that, assuming he
made appropriate backups prior to forgetting his password. Given that he
forgot his password, he likely didn't setup encrypted files.
