Hey Moe; Missing Password for vista question

[Lionheart]

Hey Mike,

I know you are in the computer biz. Have you ever ran into clients that had their password changed on their vista installations? Is there an easy way to find it or should one just reformat the thing? My brothers friend has had her password changed on her and cant get into it.

Many thanks for any advice.



Bill

[gigabyte]

Hey Bill, I have run into this before, and there is a rather simple way to get around it as long as someone has not reset the Administrator password. They need to boot with the Vista Install disk (if they do not have one they can make a repair disk - and it is perfectally legal Microsoft posts the instructions on Technet and the ISO is hosted on many sites) and reset the Administrator account.

I do have the full instructions somewhere, but basically all you do is boot to the repair console with the boot disk, do NOT select Install, select Repair my installation. You will now have access to a command console, change to the c:\windows\system32 folder and then enter the following command - "net user administrator /active:yes" now just exit the command prompt and reboot, you have done nothing other than turn on the Administrator account which is disabled by default. When the system boots select Administrator (unless someone deliberatly set a password there is none), you will now have full access to all admin functions, go to the Control panel and select Users, and change the password. Caution here watch the prompts, if the user folders are encrypted this can lock them up, and the user is SOL. The messaging is clear so if it warns against changing the password because the data will be locked STOP! Then what I would do is to use the ADministrator account to make a full backup of all the users docs, pics, music etc into the Public folder on the system - Admins can do anything! Then go back and change the PW, if the data gets locked blow it away and resotre you nice sae backup from the Public folder.

I believe there are some very good step by step instructions at www.howtogeek.com which cover this and a huge number of other subjects, well worth a look it is a great site.

One last thing DO NOT FORGET to disable that Administrator account (you can do it via Users icon in Control Panel before you reboot, or repeat above and change the Yes to a No on the command line) if you leave it active it leaves the system wide open to every nasty bug it gets. People $hit all over Vista for many things and User Access was a real PITA, however M$ did the right thing in disabling that Administrator account by default. I go one step further on all systems I set up, I change the name of the Administrator account, set a strong password then disable it, my users think I am paranoid, but our company got hit with a virus about this time last year and our region came out looking like a rose, most branches had to reimage all their PC's because of the infection (it reset the Administrator account) and I had only to do some clean up to remove the infected files.

Edit: BTW the above applies to XP and Windows 7, if you boot to a command prompt with the Install or Repair disk and run the above command in the System32 folder you can activate a disabled Administrator account which will allow you to fix any number of sins committed by "Stupid User Tricks".

[hey_moe]

Why don't ya just hit the F8 key, go into safe mode and reset it.

[Lionheart]

Thanks guys. I'll relay this over to my brother.





Bill