lost Win2k password! how to retrieve or clear it...

[nguyenminhtung]

Please help, one of my friend lost his win2k password, now he can't login anymore, Is there anyway to get a pass or clear it without reinstall win2k?
thanks

 

[MuK107]

can he cancel out of the log in?

 

[nguyenminhtung]

it is win2k, you can't do that, with win98 you can

 

[MuK107]

im not sure then, if you boot into save mode would that work?

 

[joinT]

which password did he lose ?
if he still knows the Administrator password - he can login as the Administrator & just change it.

 

[CSoup]

go here for instructions. Basically you have to boot in and modify the registry. By default you need the password to login to the recovery console, so most of the methods outlined require a boot disk that has ntfs drivers on it so that you can bypass NT/2000. There should be boot images on the site I linked.

 

[nguyenminhtung]

thanks CSuop. I think you gave me a key to try! Yeah, he lost his admin pass, so there is no way he can bypass it by boot...

 

[virtuamike]

If you formatted as FAT32 instead of NTFS, you can also just use a normal DOS boot floppy or whatever to get to command prompt, and then just delete the SAM database. I'm not sure which 3 files it is, look it up, shouldn't be too hard to find.