YODA74
03-16-2003, 10:13 AM
Recovering from a lost or changed admin password W/2000
There are two ways to fix the situation. The #1. Most Important thing IS make sure you make backups of everything before you try this, just in case. These are radical solutions for a tough situation.
1) Did you keep your root partition/drive as a FAT32/16 area? If you did the solution is easy. Get any Windows9x boot disk and boot up to it, then CD to X:\WINNT\system32\config and delete SAM (no extension), SAM.SAV, and SAM.LOG. The SAM without an extension is actually an exe file. Those three files control the usernames and passwords. Delete them, reboot, and there will be NO admin password to worry about. Recreate users as before and this time keep the admin password to yourself.
2) What if your root drive is NTFS? A Win9x boot disk won't work. Well, hopefully you have a spare partition to reinstall a copy of Win2K into. Then just CD to the directory listed above on the old copy of Windows 2000, remove those files, edit boot.ini, and reboot--you get the same result.
There are two ways to fix the situation. The #1. Most Important thing IS make sure you make backups of everything before you try this, just in case. These are radical solutions for a tough situation.
1) Did you keep your root partition/drive as a FAT32/16 area? If you did the solution is easy. Get any Windows9x boot disk and boot up to it, then CD to X:\WINNT\system32\config and delete SAM (no extension), SAM.SAV, and SAM.LOG. The SAM without an extension is actually an exe file. Those three files control the usernames and passwords. Delete them, reboot, and there will be NO admin password to worry about. Recreate users as before and this time keep the admin password to yourself.
2) What if your root drive is NTFS? A Win9x boot disk won't work. Well, hopefully you have a spare partition to reinstall a copy of Win2K into. Then just CD to the directory listed above on the old copy of Windows 2000, remove those files, edit boot.ini, and reboot--you get the same result.