west lothian scooby

hi all, some help needed please.

my cousins husband has recently died and she cant get into his laptop( as she dont know his password), is there any way that she can bypass the password on XP, sorry but none of us are any good with PC's so it will have to be instructions for dummies please.

thanks in advance

stevie

MattW

Stevie

Firstly my condolences.

Have you tried logging on as Administrator? The password may be defaulted to <blank>.

Nog

Stevie

There's a number of options. Some easier than others.

The easy options rely on the C: drive being formatted as FAT or FAT32. Is this the case?

If not, there are other ways...

Once I know the file system, I'll give u more info.

Nog

BuRR

I've got a CD that, when booted from, can reset the administrator (or any other) user password.

btw... XP Home or XP Pro, as XP Home doesn't have a dedicated administrator account AFAIK.

Danny B

If you have a CD burner and a fast internet connection, download this iso and boot up from the CD that it creates to reset the password.
http://ebcd.pcministry.com

Chris L

That looks really usefull Danny - have you tried it?

Chris

Danny B

Yes, got me out of a few sticky situations before I discovered Winternals ERD.

The Romping Armadillo

When you get your fast switching welcome screen with all your user accounts hit Ctrl+Alt+Del twice this will give you a standard login box enter Administrator and the password you may have entered when installing XP and heypresto logged in as Admin.

If you make all the other accounts limited you will get admininstrator appear in the FS welcome screen but either way Ctrl+Alt+Del twice will work.

BuRR

I've done this with XP Pro no problem.

XP Home has the admin account only available in safe mode, and instead gives all new users admin rights by default.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=290109