Win2K: forgot password

[DanielR]

Ok, the situation is I installed win2k for a friend. Everything worked out fine until my friend tried to network them and inadvertently set a new administrator password, or so he says.

After guessing at it for a while, with no luck, I installed a second win2k so he could sitll access his files. The origianl win2k folder is untouched.

Is there a way to find the passwords? or is it lost forever?

Also, before i installed win2k, he had windows ME, so after i installed 2k, the OS boot option screen is now there. I deleted the windows ME folder, so selecting winME doesn't do anything useful. How do I get rid of the winME options in the boot option screen.

Thanks
Daniel<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by danielr on 07/20/03 08:23 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[pIII_Man]

to get rid of the me option...search for a hidden file called Boot.ini...it should be in the root directory of your C:\ drive...open it using notepad and delete the whole line about windows me...here is an example of my boot.ini...although it is not dual booting with ME it should give you an idea...in bold is what you should delete (substituting ME for dos).

[boot loader]
timeout=7
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(5)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
<b>C:\="MS-DOS" </b>


There is no smell better than fried silicon

 

[pIII_Man]

about the password...it is lost...i am sure that microsoft has put quite a bit of protection on info of that magnitude...sorry

There is no smell better than fried silicon

 

[DanielR]

yeah, the interenet rocks..

I got rid of the lines in the boot.ini

there is a lovely app from pchelplive.com that someone wrote that can look at/edit and do all sort of cool stuff, like reset admin passwords!

works great. Problems all solved.

who ever has the most ram when they die wins!

 

[pIII_Man]

glad to hear that...

There is no smell better than fried silicon

 

[Solstice]

Ok here is what you do. Pull the harddrive out of your friends machine. Add it as a slave on another machine.
Search the harddrive for Files named SAM. The first SAM should be in the WINNT/RECOVER folder and the second should be in the WINNT/System32 folder, Delete those files from friends harddrive. Put hardddrive back in friends machine and the Admin password will be blank.

Once you delete the sam file Windoze will recreate a new one.