I repaired student PCs pro bono. In the course of preparing a machine, I configured secure passwords. A week later, she’s in my office telling me she needs her password again. How should I know  what heR friggin password was- that was like a week ago? thought i was sunk, but my google-fu found this:

Forgot your Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista admin password?

This is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista etc system.

  1. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.
  2. It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppydisk or CD or another system.
  3. Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts!
  4. There is also a registry editor and other registry utilities that works under linux/unix, and can be used for other things than password editing.
XP/VISTA Password & Registry Boot Disk (167)

How to create the LIVE USB;

To make a bootable USB drive / key:

  1. Copy all files from this CD onto the USB drive. It cannot be in a subdirectory on the drive. You do not need delete files already on the drive.
  2. 2. Install the bootloader (you may have to be administrator).
  3. On the USB drive, there should now be a file “syslinux.exe”. Run this from a command line, like this:

j:\syslinux.exe -ma j:

replace j with some other letter if your USB drive is on a drive letter other than (J:). On some drives, you may have to omit the -ma option if you get an error. If it says nothing, it probably did install the bootloader.

Please note that you may have to adjust settings in your computers BIOS
setup to boot from USB.  Also, some BIOS (often older machines) simply won’t boot from USB anyway.

I’ve stored the files here because I don’t know if this site will be up forever. please give them some hits when you can.

Popularity: 19% [?]


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COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS

link has been down………

i-m added these pithy words on Sep 09 09 at 1:01 am

My bad, the link has been repaired.

Curtis added these pithy words on Oct 30 09 at 10:15 am

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