It’s your first day on the job and you’re rearing to go. The previous administrator left two weeks ago so the servers have been running on their own with no administrative maintenance. Microsoft decides that today is also the day they are going to release a number of critical update patches to the Windows Server platform. You head into the server room ready to update the servers but realize that you don’t know the administrative password to log on to the machines. To make matters even more interesting, it appears that no one else in the office does either and the previous admin didn’t document them. Thankfully, you are a dedicated reader of the articles on the 2000 Trainers site and have a solution.
Note – The following utility is not supported by Microsoft and does pose the remote possibility of permanently damaging the registry. Use at your own risk and please read all the online material before attempting. In addition, while this utility can be used maliciously, it is meant to be a “save the day” tip for administrators. Please use it responsibly.
The “Offline NT Password and Registry Editor” is located at http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ and can be used to reset the local administrator password on Windows platforms from Windows 3.51 to Windows 2003. The first thing you want to do is download either the floppy image or the ISO image for a CD-ROM depending on your preference. If you download the floppy image, be sure to grab the SCSI drivers if your boot partition is located on SCSI drives. For this high level walkthrough I used the floppy image.
Once you’ve unzipped the binaries, put a floppy in the drive and run the install.bat file. It will create the floppy image using the included rewrite utility. Place the floppy in the server and restart the server. After the linux kernel loads you will see the following screen:
In our example, we only have a single partition to select so we will choose device number one. The next prompt will be for the location of the registry. Just accept the default and press Enter. Since we want to reset the local administrator password, select option one at the next prompt.
At the next prompt, select option one again as we are editing user data and passwords. Notice how the local administrator account appears as an editable account at the next screen. Select the appropriate option for the administrator.
At the next screen we can change the password to whatever we want or use the asterisk wildcard to blank out the current password. Save your changes and write it back to the registry. Eject the floppy, restart the machine and log on as the administrator using the password you selected when modifying the account.