forgot vm password

[sittas87]

Hi There

I dont know if there's anyone out there familiar with Vsphere Virtual Machine...

I have Vsphere machine that runs one VM installed on it with windows 2003. Thing is I removed the VM from the domain and joined it to the workgroup but now I dont know what the local administrator password of this vm machine is, as i was always logging in with my AD credentials before i removed it from the domain.

My question...How do I easily recover my VM 03 server password without losing data? Or how do I at least boot from cd disk in VM?

Any help\ ideas is GREATLY appreciated...

Sitas87

[jlego]

maybe you can give this a try

A. Boot using Windows XP Setup CD and follow the instruction like Accepting EULA, etc.

B. When it asks to repair your existing Windows installation, accept it and press "R" to run the repair.

C. Setup will start repairing your Windows and will start copying files, etc.

D. After a few minutes setup will restart your system and when it restarts don't press any key when it shows "Press any key to continue..." otherwise Setup will start from the beginning. Don't press any key and setup will resume where it left.

E. Now it'll start doing other tasks and will show a small progressbar with a few details in left side.

F. Look carefully at the details and when it shows "Installing devices", press <Shift>+F10 keys in your keyboard.

G. It'll open a Command Prompt window. Now type nusrmgr.cpl and press <Enter>.

H. It'll open the same "User Accounts" window which you see in Control Panel.

I. Now you can remove or reset any account password without any problem.

if it doesnt work i used a command prompt method to reset admin password before, just cant for the life of me remember exactly how - would have to look it up again