Recovering Lost Win XP Password
Today, I made a dumb boo-boo with my Windows notebook. I was locked out without an administrator password - how dumb is that?
I was preparing for some demos and was frustrated by some of the bugs that I had hit. The bad thing was that the server and engineers were located in Singapore, and I suspected that my machine name was getting cached in the server and not allowing my operations to be processed. So I tried to change my machine name.
In my corporate environment, all notebooks are part of an NT domain. This meant that if my machine wanted to rejoin as as different ID, I needed administrative rights. And with a company meeting going on at the same time, I didn’t want to wait in queue for IT to help me out. So I dropped out of the domain, hoping that I could restore my partition image this weekend to rejoin the domain.
When I restarted, OOPS! - I forgot the local Administrator password. And since my machine was no longer part of the network, I couldn’t log in with my domain password. The Linux boot disks I had only granted me read-only access to NTFS drives, and none hinted at being able to reset Administrator password.
I took it down to IT, where they attempted to use the preinstalled Administrator password to log in (which I had disabled to avoid unauthorized access to my notebook). Too bad. Then they tried ERD Commander - a utility by Winternals that helped administrators reset lost password. And hey, that didn’t work too! Somehow my system was locked down and the utility couldn’t access my registry.
Now I started getting worried. My demo was at 4pm in the afternoon, and it was then 11 pm.
I pulled out my Norton Ghost image and asked IT to reimage the boot partition. I’m fortunate that I just made the image last week, so it was relatively up-to-date. It took about 30 minutes to restore the image. And everything fell back in order….
What a relief. The demo was postponed (that’s another story), but at least I was able to carry on working. And because I kept most of my work data on another partition, the reimaging didn’t affect any of my work or email. Amazing!
Lesson of the today: always keep your data in another drive.