Lost XP Pro Admin Password

[matt_peloquin]

Anyone ever deal with this before? Let me tell you...lots of fun.

So I had XP Home and had one user "Quinn". I upgraded to XP Pro and for soe reaosn, I was now prompted with a popup login (similar to the one most people have and that I have at work) asking for a password for a user "matthew". I don't recall setting up this user (my name) and had no password, but if I hit OK I was logged in with no problems.

I looked into the User Accounts and saw that Quinn was still the administrator and that Matthew was a user. So I figred I'd keep it simple and got rid of Matthew since , well, I was Quinn and had no password for that account either.

Now, when I bootup, I get a prompt for Matthew but by entering no password, I can't get in. The same happens when I try with Quinn.

So after all of that here's where I'm at: I need to find a way to get into my computer and bypass the logins since I don't have passwords for wither accoutn (which are both mine and my names).

Does anyone have any easy solutions for me? A floppy disk I can setup from another computer to be able to get back into mine?

Your feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt

[email][e-mail][/email]

[DMR]

The first (and easiest) thing to check out is this:

XP creates a default account for a user named "Administrator", and this account is different fron any other user accounts which are members of the "Administrators" group.

You'll sometimes find that although passwords have been set for all other user accounts that have been created on the computer, there has been no password set for the user "Administrator". Try typing Administrator as the user name in the login window and then just hit Enter; if no password has been set for the Administrator user account, Windows will happily log you in as the system administrator. If that works, you can modify your user accounts/passwords from there.

If that doesn't work, things get difficult; you can't just "bypass" the login on XP or 2000 systems like you could with Win 95/98.

There are a number of tools you can use to recover or change a forgotten password, and some of them involve a Linux boot disk. The reason being that Linux can access Windows drives/partitions, but it totally ignores Windows permissions and passwords.

Here are a couple of links which discuss some of the options:

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_admin...or_password.htm
http://is-it-true.org/nt/atips/atips262.shtml

And here are the results of a general Google search on the subject:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...ecovery&spell=1

[DarphBobo]

Hi,

Go here, get this, make one, boot up. http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
It is based on linux. Most of the time, just accept the defaults. THe above link to Petri's MSCE world is great, they offer a lot of help. If you have trouble running the resetter, ask for help here. I'll check back. Works great on 2k, XP. Not so good on 2003.

Darph
never underestimate the power of a dark clown