XP Administrator password forgotten...need windows guru;

A good friend of mine is a manager of a cell phone store. He often asks me for help with simple computer issues, and I can usually help him. So he calls me today and says that one of his employees accidentally deleted the employee account and created a password for the administrator account. The employee says they forgot the password. So now they only have 1 user account (administrator) with a password that they can't remember. /*Smells like sabotage but it's none of my business.*/ So he asks me how he can edit the password, and the first thing I ask is do you have the windows disk? I was thinking repair console... Well they can't find thier windows disk anywhere (of course who would have guessed). And a reinstall would be chaos, lost information and surely the loss of my friends job. Sigh, you would think that people would think a little more ...

Any ideas fellas?

Thanks,

Rob

Winternals ERD commander 2005... best program hands down for any pc booting troubles.

Includes the Locksmith utility to reset lost Administrator passwords

http://www.winternals.com/Products/ErdCommander/

im not sure legality but its what i use.

second that motion to move or something... locksmith util is secksi

This looks real good... I will have them try this out and I will post on the outcome.

Thanks again, very much!

Rob

no problemo senior

awesome, at my highschool, teachers come and go and they have usernames on a couple of standalone pc's that still have info like school charts etc. i'll try this out.

shoot, i thought it was freeware.

Beginner said:

awesome, at my highschool, teachers come and go and they have usernames on a couple of standalone pc's that still have info like school charts etc. i'll try this out.

shoot, i thought it was freeware.

Click to expand...

naughty naughty

Hey if you still need help send me a PM and I'll tell you everything you need to know...plus free software.

i think theres a password recovery tool on overclockix (a version of linux on a livecd).

try this page...

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm

or this...

http://www.loginrecovery.com/ <--free service, 48 hour response or $15 (ruff) for priority service.

Beginner said:

awesome, at my highschool, teachers come and go and they have usernames on a couple of standalone pc's that still have info like school charts etc. i'll try this out.

shoot, i thought it was freeware.

Click to expand...

Good job. You left a nice virtual paper trail for someone curious enough to follow. And chances are, your admin at the school might get curious when teachers start complaining that their passwords have been changed. The "truly" 1e37 h4x0rz are the ones you never hear about. Why? Ever hear the saying "loose lips sink ships?"
Real hackers don't tell internet buddies they hacked a Gibson; this will result in spending the next 10-15 in an eight foot cell. "1337 h4x0r2" brag about things they've never done and will never do because they want to look big on the internet. Posting thousands of times on alt.2600 and the like may be considered ELEET to the crater faced monitor tanned demographic that frequents such communities, but in fact it couldn't be further from the truth: the more time you spend posting on forums about doing this and that, the less time you are spending doing anything else, such as hacking.
The dumbest ones are the first to get caught, and they usually get caught because they a) didn't take the necessary precautions to ensure their anonyminity, or b) couldn't keep their mouths shut.
Gyah, kids these days...
Bragging about doing something illegal that you are never going to do is stupid enough, but bragging about doing something illegal and then doing it is just asking to get caught.

futura2001 said:

Bragging about doing something illegal that you are never going to do is stupid enough, but bragging about doing something illegal and then doing it is just asking to get caught.

Click to expand...

You're not a hacker if you use commercial software to do the deed.

MonroeM said:

You're not a hacker if you use commercial software to do the deed.

Click to expand...

No, one most certainly is not. But the script kiddies seem to think that they are t3h ub3r and whatnot. However, that is another discussion for another time...
While it certainly brings me some amusement to read the news and see another "Some dumb hacker got himself caught and is going to prison" story every week, it does affect the rest of the community, and ultimately everyone else as well. As lawmakers have a nasty habit of using such stories and statistics to find reasons to pass ever more stringent regulations on the internet and digital freedom in general.
Never mind the fact that most of the people that do get caught aren't smart enough to find their own *** with both hands. The real cruelty is that the rest of us have to pay for what the bottom of the barrel gets caught for...

Use this tool:

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

I've used this for personal work I do on the side. Its a boot disk, you burn it, and in 1 minute you have admin access to the box... Especially useful when you need to use the recovery console but don't have admin rights. Using mostly defaults will get you what you need, read some of the directions, as after you make the change it will tell you the changes were made, but then you need to save them for them to actually be applied.

By the way, recovery console would not help in his situation. But once you get admin you can recreate a user account and then he'll be good to go. In any matter, you'll need to login as admin before you can use recovery console... After three incorrect tries, it will kick you out and reboot.