Windows XP Administrator password lost?
Windows XP Administrator password lost?
This is something that happens to even the best of us. It's happened to me before even! We all know that we are not supposed to run as the administrator account for our general usage so many of us put in a password that nobody would ever guess (including yourself) There are quite a few routes to getting back in. I'm only going to cover a couple of my favorite FREE methods.
Method #1
AUSTRUMI is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution that can change the passwords for any user on Windows NT, 2000 or XP INCLUDING the administrator account.
All you have to do is boot the CD and when you get to the first command prompt type in:
boot: nt_pass
The software will scan your hard drives and detect your user accounts. Simply follow the directions on the screen and you'll be able to change your password for any user! The other cool part about this is being able to modify your registry if you really messed things up.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/austrumi
Method #2
EBCD - Emergency Boot CD
Quoted from their site: EBCD is a bootable CD, intended for system recovery in the case of software or hardware faults. It is able to create backup copies of normally working system and restore system to saved state. It contains the best system software ever created, properly compiled and configured for the maximum efficient use.
You may download image builder utility which creates image of bootable CD-ROM (.ISO file), plus basic set of system tools. When the image is ready, write it to CD-R or CD-RW, and then everytime you'll need convenient and powerful system tools they'll be just at hand.
It is easy to customize the disk for your needs. You can include to CD any program you like, or remake the structure of CD completely. All you need is to change a few lines in configuration XML files.
This system is much more powerful but also much more complex. I'm not going step by step on this one cause there's too many variables. Just thought I'd let everybody know about this cool project.