lost administrator's password!!!!
 

I tinker with building and repair on computors but, I don't know how start tring to sort this problem out. The admin-
at a small church school quit after his kid got expelled for squriting other kids with a fire bottle. The computers are lock-out from adding a printer or even getting to the teacher's desk top. What can I try to fix this problem for them. I don't charge them because it is just my hobby and I'm learning alot for my own use. Thank you guy's and girl's for any help. Ken


P.S> they are older computer with OS XP.

I've had this happen to me, albeit a very long time ago. I used a Linux password recovery CD given to me by one of my friends. It was basically just a bootable Linux CD that allowed you to change/reset the administrator password on the machine. I scratched around but I couldn't find it anywhere.

I did, however, find this site which explains a couple of ways to get around your problem. Check it out - hope it helps.

u se ophcrack for all my cracking needs

http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/

windows xp is lame for passwords, it stores all password hashes for passwords under 14 characters in the old, outdated LAN manager hash system, even worse is it breaks these passwords into two, 7 character chunks, making cracking very easy. Download
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/o...1.iso?download
And burn to a cd, let it boot and it will start cracking right away; eventually it will display the passwords for you for each account.

Is the admin password the one you need, or is it just the user password? You said you couldn't even get to the teacher's desktop, so I am gonna just assume it's a user account..

1. Boot into safe mode (F8 at boot up)
2. Log into the admin account (sadly most admin accounts are not PW protected because they are not seen nor used normally. Security by obscurity, it's the M$ way!)
3. Change the user account PW to whatever you want.
4. Log off.
5. Boot normally, log-on with your new password!

if the admin account is PW protected, then take Dilbert's advice, and start cracking those hive files!

I use this program to reset the admin password.

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

I use EBCD (Emergency Boot CD) every time. Very easy and straight forward.

http://ebcd.pcministry.com/


Edit: Wtf?! I remember a second atempt at this post and it ended up coming out so fubar'd:confused:

Note to self....hide fire extinguishers at church....


Krycheck, very good finds. I'm going to have to save those pages for myself in case I ever need them.

befor you clear the password... does this account have any files encrypted with EFS? if it does, clearing the password will hose any chance of recovering them.

oh, if you have ANY accounts that can get to windows, i can tell you (PM) how to elevate your user rights to System, which can create new accounts with admin rights, which can then change the password of the other account.

Try the Ultimate Boot CD. I know it works for FAT drives, it may also work under NTFS nowadays, too. It has the option to blank the password out so you can login and change it at will.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I'll second Dilbert's warning about encryption. It's unusual, but if there's any chance the login uses it you really don't want to clear the password.

Dilbert, I can open a student desk top and I tried to change the user level but it was blocked by admin. It sound like I can start a new user opition with admin rights and change or add programs and hardware. which is the whole problem as it stands now. There is no one acting as pm for these computers thats why I'm trying to help. THanks again for everyones help!!

Well in the past few months, MS fixed the problem, so i will just openly share the exploit. when windows used to runs a screen saver, it is ran under system privileges, with a boot disk, make a copy of cmd.exe and rename this copy cmd.scr, boot the system, and change the screensaver to this new file. change the timeout to 1 minute, and wait, after a minute, if your system is not fully patched, the command prompt that pops up will be running as system instead of the current user, then you can use the 'net user' command to add a new account with admin rights, log in with that user and you have a new admin account. This method works much better with win2k, where 'everyone' has full access to all directories by default, instead of just read as is the case under winxp.

Not sure if I'm understanding the problem correctly, but there was a computer here in the office that had the same issue. All I did was put a win2k disc in the drive and boot off of it. Then I went into the recovery console naturally since it's 2k and not XP it didn't need the PW. So I loaded XP in 2k's recovery console. Then.. I just exited and booted up and the pw was gone ;)

Maybe I got lucky.

I take it calling the guy who left and asking him for the password is completely out of the question?

tried and got nowhere!
 

We called him and he has just happen to forgotten what it is. Thanks for asking, Ken