[tig3r]

Hi, thanks for the great info! Here is my situation. I am a mom with a teenager. He has a computer with win XP Home SP 2. He was supposed to leave my account as an administrator account (and I did have a password on it.) I let him have an administrator account. Now he is gone for a few weeks and I want to do maintenance on the computer. He has deleted my password and changed my account to Limited. Only his account and mine show up on the welcome screen. I googled and found Daniel's site with link to www.loginrecovery.net. I did everything and uploaded the results. Three accounts showed up. Mine (Status code 6, no password), Administrator (Status code 5, password for this user is blank), and son's (also Status code 6) Status code 6 also says "If there is a password then the password for this user cannot be obtained because the security on the system is too high. The LM hash does not exist in the registry and therefore, while it is still possible to obtain the password it would take the world's fastest computers days to work out even quite simple passwords."
What does this mean? (about his password.) Also, how can I get to the blank-password administrator account? What should I do? (Ideally I would learn his password, log in as him, and do the maintenance.)

thanks!

[guest1]

I could not retrieve my lost password from loginrecovery.com either. I am not sure if they are legitimate as they boast that they can recover 98.5% of the passwords. While we may be in that 1.5% whose passwords cannot be recovered, I also emailed them for help to understand what happened and they were of no help. I would not recommend them to anyone, unless someone has had a success they would like to share.

[tonyyeb]

Have you tried booting into safemode and logging in as the administrator?

[batman]

try using the Peter Nordahl-Hagen boot disk down refered to at http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_admini...r_password.htm it down loads the image from http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/cd050303.zip all you have to do is extract it and burn the ISO image onto a CDrom using any burner you have. From there change the target machines boot referance ( in the machines Bios ) to boot from the CD ( hold down "del" after the machine is tuned on to get to the BIOS ) then follow the prompts of the code from the boot disk. It worked a treat for me !!

[guest1]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have not tried safemode - I used the CD- rom version of loginrecovery.com where it brings you to it's own recovery screen. But I will try safemode instead. I will also look into the second site recommended to me. Thanks again for the quick responses and suggestions.

[guest1]

If I use the eunet download, will it change anything on the computer after I boot from the CD, change the target machine's boot reference?

[batman]

The eunet boot disk is a Linux kernal that accesses some of the systems encrpted files and decrypts them then substitutes some information in those files. It does change information on the computer but if you are only trying to revocer from a lost passowrd situation then you should be OK - BUT follow the prompts carefully.

To change the PC to boot from the CD rather than the harddrive ( with Windows on it ) you have to manipulate the computer BIOS. This can be done by holding down the DEL key after rebooting the PC. After that the BIOS menu should come up and you have to navigate the mennu and find the right area to change the boot option. your PC motherboard should be able to help if you have it.

[kwajman04]

Originally Posted by batman

try using the Peter Nordahl-Hagen boot disk down refered to at http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_admini...r_password.htm it down loads the image from http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/cd050303.zip all you have to do is extract it and burn the ISO image onto a CDrom using any burner you have. From there change the target machines boot referance ( in the machines Bios ) to boot from the CD ( hold down "del" after the machine is tuned on to get to the BIOS ) then follow the prompts of the code from the boot disk. It worked a treat for me !!

Batman,, Thank you for this post. You did good by me. hope it worked for the other person....

[Ossian]

Tig3r
From your first post the administrator account has a blank password.

Try this:
Boot normally
Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE twice
(You should see the "normal" username/password box)
Enter Username "Administrator" (no quotes) and leave the password blank
Press Return or click the OK button

See if you get in

If you do:
Leave everything alone so your son doesnt suspect you have a backdoor in
Check very carefully what he is doing thats hidden from you
Take action appropriately....

Tom

EDIT -- original post was from 2005 so the above answer is probably not relevant