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You are back from a long vacation. You turn on your computer and when you try to log on with your administrator account; Windows XP gives you an error message saying that the password is invalid.

Yours is the only user account in the operating system so you cannot log on with any other user account and reset administrator account’s password. There is a lot of urgent and confidential data on your computer. What should you do to log on again and access your data?

Well, the solution is quite simple. First download the file cd070409.zip from http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/. The file can be unzipped to an ISO image file. This file can be burned to CD. Use the option to create a disc from image from your CD Burner program. The image creates a bootable Linux CD.

WARNING!!!!!

If this CD is used on computers with users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or Vista, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless the old password is retrieved.

Now,

1. Insert the CD and boot from it.

2. The following screen lists the partitions on your computer’s hard disk with their corresponding sizes and numbers.

3. First determine the drive in which has your windows installation and type the appropriate drive number and press enter.

4. In the following screen, if the default path of the registry directory is correct, press enter or if it is not, type the correct path and press enter.

5. Press 1 to choose the option to reset the password and press enter.

6. In order to edit user data and passwords, press 1 and then press enter.

7. By default the administrator account is selected so press enter.

8. In the following screen, press * to blank the password and then press enter.

9. Press y to accept the changes and press enter.

10. Press ! and enter to quit

11. Press q to quit.

12. In the writing back changes screen press y and then press enter

13. In the new run screen, press n and enter.

Now remove the bootable CD and restart your computer by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL.

If you have blanked the password, then you won’t be asked for any password and Windows loads the user’s profile.

That’s it!!!!

Note that, the trick works for Windows XP Professional/Home/SP1/SP2 or even on Windows 2003 Server. So next time when you return from your vaction, you know how you can recover your administrator password !