Forgot User Admin. Account Password :(

[r_j]

My fater in law forgot his password to his computer. he has win xp sp2. He only has the Admin Accnount on his couputer. Is there anything he can do to gain access to his computer and reset the password maybe without having to reinstall th OS

[Chewy]

what logins does he have after booting into safe mode?

login Administator
password

[r_j]

not sure hes tried that ill get him to and see what happens

[Chewy]

that's the failsafe backup that ms hides, you can even delete the default account from an xp computer and only have the hidden admin available to log in from

[katzdvd]

Ah, there's always a back door!

[MilesAhead]

cool

Ah, there's always a back door!

Cool. That's the first time I heard about the safe mode bootup for
forgotten password. I know there are some Linux boot discs with
utilities to edit user accounts or just paste in a new Administrator
password. So if safe mode doesn't work search the web for one
of those.

[Chewy]

If you made mydocs private in the default regular admin user then your only choice would be to hack the computer like miles is talking about

if you didn't, then from the hidden admin login you could move all you data and create a new admin login and delete the old one

[katzdvd]

sudo apt-get access admin acct.

There's one in every crowd!

Cool. That's the first time I heard about the safe mode bootup for
forgotten password. I know there are some Linux boot discs with
utilities to edit user accounts or just paste in a new Administrator
password. So if safe mode doesn't work search the web for one
of those.

Yeah, I recently saw a topic on the ubuntu forums relating to those utility discs. Pretty nice weapon to have in your arsenal!

[olyteddy]

I used one of those disks at work and it worked like a charm. It listed all the accounts on the machine and allowed me to delete the password for any or all of them. Found it on Google, from Switzerland iirc.