admin passord lost, what now?

[Detlef]

I lost the admin password for my (XP) Dell at home! What can I do to reset it (short of reinstalling the OS)? Can I start it with DOS off a floppy and simply change a file entry? Or is it more complex than that? And I thought I was so smart setting this all up, with me being *God* and noone else in the family....

Maybe this amounts to hacking into a protected machine and shouldn't be posted here?

I know there is ERD Commander, but it costs big bucks...

--Detlef

[MoNsTeR]

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

(I have not personally tested this tool.)

[Rob Boudrie]

I have used the pnordhal tool, and it's great. It's actually a floppy bootable version of Linux which brings up a text based registry editor. I've never used any of the fancy features - just deleted the Administrator password and then rebooted - worked like the proverbial charm. The only time the tool failed me was in attempting to recover the admin password on a Dell 1650 which used a SCSI boot drive on an internal RAID controller - there was no driver for this in the Nordhal tool (it didn't hurt anything - just didn't help in that one case).

Also, when setting up your system, it's generally a good idea to configuer more than one user id with administrator priviliges - that way you have a spare if you lose or mess up one of the passwords.

[shred]

The Linux boot disks/CDs work OK on XP, even though some just say "NT" or "Windows 2000". I think Knoppix-STD will also do this.

With physical access there is no security..

[Rob Boudrie]

With physical access there is no security..

There is with properly encrypted data

[mcoliver]

Why don't you guys do what I do, write your passwords in a post-it pad and stick it in your monitor. As security, don't write "this is my admin password" or something obvious...

Seriously, had this happen before. Unfortunately, it seems NTFS is a pain to crack (meaning, too lazy to try and read through all the google hits.) So I just reformatted the whole thing. I now keep my personal files on another hard disk.

[Detlef]

thanks for the pnordhal suggestion. Easy CD Creator 5 complains about the downloaded CD .iso file being invalid. Tried the floppy path, the affected PC never even boots off the bd040818.zip-generated Linux floppy: *Linux boot failed*. repeated the exercise on another PC, same result *Liinux boot failed* Must be something with the tool, I guess... Next suggestion?

--Detlef

[D.Hayden]

So I just reformatted the whole thing.

Well, it's too late but.. If it happens again..

(This is assuming you didn't encrypt)

Before you format, take the drive out, and put it in another system. When that system comes up you can at least copy all your files over and save them.

Another way: Buy an external IDE->USB box for $25-$50, mount the drive there, and you can copy all the files off you want. Borrow a friends system and copy them there if you need to (in case you only have one PC), or copy them to a directory named "files", and when you install again.. DO NOT FORMAT the drive.

Reinstalling takes a little while, but it's usually the data that's important.

If you've encrypted (that I only do on business systems), this won't work, but home systems it works great.

[shred]

With physical access there is no security..

There is with properly encrypted data

Not with enough physical access. Sooner or later somebody will come along and type in a password or insert a security key or do their biometric thing to actually use the encrypted stuff. That's when you snag it.

[Detlef]

o.k., used the cd....iso version of norhal's tool, it booted fine and works for the non-admin accounts but not at all for the admin account. Tried blanking the pw, or setting a new one, but no success logging in after restart. There must be something implemented that prevents the admin account from being modified...