How to recover password

How to Recover Password

If you forget your administrator password or you just take over a administrator position with giving a password, and you don't want to re-build the server or workstation, you may be able to recover or change the password following these steps.

Create a Bootdisk

Unzip rpw 030225.zip - Bootdisk image and rawwrite2.zip - DOS Program to a folder, for example c:\ms-mvps.
Copy bd030225.bin and rawwrite.exe to C:\ms-mvps.
Insert a floppy disk in A drive
At c:\temp>, type "rawrite2 -f bd030225.bin -d A:" (without quotation) to create a floppy disk.

Change Password

Boot from the Bootdisk.
Press Enter when showing return/enter to accept default prompts in
Answer 'y' to probe all available drivers in the "scsi" dir on the floppy if you have SCSI disks.
Or answer 'n' to skip searching for SCSI cards if you only have IDE-disks.
At the prompt to select a partition, the first bootable NTFS/FAT partition will be the default selection with * mark, for example /dev/hda1 *. Select it in most cases. You may however select another partition (also a FAT partition) by giving its full name (like /dev/hda1 , or /dev/sda1). SCSI: sdDP -> D=disk a b c d etc, P=parition number 1 2 3 4 etc. IDE: hdDP -> D=a or b (primary IDE), c or d (secondary IDE), P=partition number. If you have multi-bootable, select where is your OS located. For example, if you have win98 and XP on the same computer with two hard disks. You may select /dev/hdb1 if win98 is using the first hard disk (/dev/hda1).
After mounting the partition, select the full path. If it is w2k and NT or XP upgraded from w2k/NT, type the path as winnt/system32/config. For clean installed XP, it is windows/system32/config (this is default so just press Enter to continue).
Then select files to copy to temp area in ramdisk. For password editing the default is 'sam'. Press Enter to continue.
On the main menu, select 1 Edit passwords to change the password.
When editing the password, All usernames in the file will be listed. You will then be prompted for the user which you want to change the password of. (default selection is administrator). You may instead enter the users RID (user ID).
If the account bits or lockout counts indicates a lock or disable, you will be offered opportunity to unlock it.
Entering a single * as the password will blank the password for that user. This is reported to work better than setting a new one! You may, enter the new password, max 14 chars (it will show on the screen). Or enter nothing to keep unchanged.
Then confirm the change. (actual write to disk comes when you exit the program).
If the 'chntpw' utility succeeds, you will be prompted to confirm the writeback to the NT disk/filesystem. Only 'y' is accepted for it to commit the changes. (the commit is in 2 steps. First in the editor program, then in the bootfloppy scripts. Your harddisk will only be changed if the last one is confirmed)
To quit, type ! and press Enter. Then type q for quit. Type y to Hives that have changed and y again to confirm write hive files.
After everything is complete, you will get the "# " shell prompt. You may then reset the computer by press CTRL+ALT+DEL..

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