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Recovering Windows XP admin password

Firstly, is it actually the Administrator account who's password you need reset or a user account with admin rights?

Often XP is setup with a user called say, Paul, who IS an Admin but not THE
Administrator. You turn the PC on and the logon screen shows Paul, whose account is password protected. However if you hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete 3 times at the logon screen it will change to the other style of entering the full username and password. If you enter Administrator as the username, and no
password, Often you can get in that way.

However if you really do need the Administrator password reset, look into something called Hiren's Boot Disk. If I remember correctly that can reset
passwords, as well as do a hundred other cool things.
 
Any Linux Live CD that has ntpasswd available can be used to reset the password of any account on a system.
 
I concur with Hiren's being very cool, I use it many times a week for testing hard drives, wiping hard drives, resetting passwords, recovering files, etc etc. Nothinman is also correct, there are a lot of Linux based live CDs that can reset nt passwords as well. It accesses the Hive directly and can blank the password again. Good stuff.
 
I haven't personally looked at hiren's cd in a while but I vaguely remember we could not post or talk about it here as it usually had commercial software included in it. Unless that has changed
 
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