Adminstration password help please

derbylady

my daughter has a laptop thats been broken a long time, someone has fixed it for her, but she had a password on and cant remember it, i know i can re load the disc but if we can get into it to get her old photos without wiping everything it would be great, is there a way i can get pass the adminstrator password??? any help would be fantastic thanks in advance x

robt_2

What operating system?

derbylady

Hiya, its windows xp.

mark55man

what you need to do is get a LINUX (Ubuntu, ...) boot disk and boot it up in LINUX, thenyou should be able to copy all the files onto a flash memory stick. you can get the disks "Free" with most computer magazines, or you can buy the sticks off ebay (I think)

alternatively and more dangerously - you could get the disk out and put it in a disk caddy and attach it to another computer which will load the disk up

Oneday77

derbylady wrote: »

my daughter has a laptop thats been broken a long time, someone has fixed it for her, but she had a password on and cant remember it, i know i can re load the disc but if we can get into it to get her old photos without wiping everything it would be great, is there a way i can get pass the adminstrator password??? any help would be fantastic thanks in advance x

It maybe a bit easier than that. Boot the laptop up and then press f5 once it turns on and gives you the 1st post screen, you may be as well repeatedly pressing it. This should hopefully give you a menu to boot into safe mode. If it does you will then get a windows login screen. Type in Administrator as the user and leave the password blank. You will be able to login if the administrator password has never been set. Once in go to user setup in the control panel and reset your daughters password.
This is worth people doing and then setting an adminstrator password once logged into to then modify the password to there being one set, prevents this backdoor access in the future.
I considered not replying to this as how do we know you haven't stolen the laptop and posing as a father. Then I thought don't be so suspicious. It does at least highlight a vulnerability to everyone so they can fix it

System

It is F8 and not F5.

Failing that then Peter Nordahl's password reset utility works a treat

derbylady

Oneday77 wrote: »

It maybe a bit easier than that. Boot the laptop up and then press f5 once it turns on and gives you the 1st post screen, you may be as well repeatedly pressing it. This should hopefully give you a menu to boot into safe mode. If it does you will then get a windows login screen. Type in Administrator as the user and leave the password blank. You will be able to login if the administrator password has never been set. Once in go to user setup in the control panel and reset your daughters password.
This is worth people doing and then setting an adminstrator password once logged into to then modify the password to there being one set, prevents this backdoor access in the future.
I considered not replying to this as how do we know you haven't stolen the laptop and posing as a father. Then I thought don't be so suspicious. It does at least highlight a vulnerability to everyone so they can fix it

Thanks, i put an administrator password on earlier when i was trying to reset the password, so when i put the password in the box next to administrator it wont accept it, so would this only work if i hadnt put the administrator password on?

GeoffX

Changing the administrator password can apparently have side effects in certain circumstances. You might want to consider OphCrack. I haven't used it myself, but it's on SourceForge so it shouldn't contain anything nasty. The Live CD is a pretty large download, but it claims be able to crack most passwords very quickly.

Oneday77

derbylady wrote: »

Thanks, i put an administrator password on earlier when i was trying to reset the password, so when i put the password in the box next to administrator it wont accept it, so would this only work if i hadnt put the administrator password on?

If you 'put an administrator password in but it is set to blank then you wouldn't get in. The only way to apply a password is to key it in and then confirm the new password when you set it up.
This trick will only work if the password has never been changed from the default of no password, only the username of administrator would be required.
As far as changing the administrator password causing issues, typically that is the hidden system administrator in Vista. I suspect this is an XP machine. It is never advisable to leave the admin user with no password.
But as others have mentioned you can try the password reset tools available to you.

GeoffX

The problem with changing an administrator password seems to relate to the use of encryption with the file system, so it shouldn't affect most people, but I'd want to look into it more before I risked it.

This page gives some instructions on how to do it with just a Windows CD ( ignore the buy something for $34.95 nonsense ). Whether it works or not?