I know some of you guys have all sorts of little tricks for doing this kinda thing, so I wonder if one of you could point me in the right direction?

I've got a XP PC that has Administrator as the only member of the Admin group, and the password is unknown.  Whats the best way to recover it?

While you are restarting your machine, press the F8 (or which ever suits your system) key to get the "Boot Mode" menu. Choose "Safe Mode". Once you get to the Log in screen log in as administrator with no password. This will allow you to reset forgotten local admin/users passwords.

or, there is a program you can get, which you burn to a cd and it boots up before windows and will delete the password. cant remember what it is called though

Yeah!  Passware works great...

Good to know that XP has such good security.

Quote (madmanfrommars @ Aug. 14 2006, 4:36 pm)

Good to know that XP has such good security.

Well!  The first tip should work...  Then again, it wouldn't work on MY PC...  It depends on how you set it.  And the Passware program ain't free...  About $500...

Failing that i do this stuff for a livnig post here if you need a hand. You will need a windows PE (preinstallation environment) disk

Quote (sandman_qc @ Aug. 14 2006, 3:24 pm)

While you are restarting your machine, press the F8 (or which ever suits your system) key to get the "Boot Mode" menu. Choose "Safe Mode". Once you get to the Log in screen log in as administrator with no password. This will allow you to reset forgotten local admin/users passwords.

That only works w/ XP Home and it's 'hidden' Admin login, right?

Quote (Agent007 @ Aug. 14 2006, 5:15 pm)

Quote (sandman_qc @ Aug. 14 2006, 3:24 pm) While you are restarting your machine, press the F8 (or which ever suits your system) key to get the "Boot Mode" menu. Choose "Safe Mode". Once you get to the Log in screen log in as administrator with no password. This will allow you to reset forgotten local admin/users passwords. That only works w/ XP Home and it's 'hidden' Admin login, right?

It's hidden by default on XP Pro unless you're using the login prompt and not the Welcome Screen.


As for PW recovery, whatever you do backup your registry first (boot into the Recovery Console and physically backup all the reg files) because alot of these password recovery tools just [beep] up your user account and/or passwords and do ALOT more harm then good.

I dont have any tools to reccomend because I've honestly never had this issue.

Well, I posted about this in the Linux distros thread re: the sysrec recovery CD, but I guess you guys didn't read that

There's a completely free tool called chntpw that will do it.  It's Linux based, and on the page above there's a link in the "download" section to a bootable CD image or a boot disk image.

I've used it many times on WinNT, Windows 2000 and XP systems - just boot from the CD/floppy, follow the instructions (the defaults work just fine on most systems unless you've installed Windows to a second partition or hard drive), and blank the Administrator password (you can also set it to something, but they recommend the least instrusive way is to just make it blank).  Reboot, log in, change it to whatever you want.

As an old Polish flea market seller once said about his fry pans, "Works good."