Windows Password Recovery

Windows Password Recovery

Did you forget your windows password? Or maybe you never knew it 😉 Whatever the case to use the procedure I’m going to show you, you will need physical access to the computer so I doubt you are actually a hacker. If you still do not understand it, you can ring up an IT consulting firm for a resolution.

The process I am about to describe will work in any windows NT based system. So you can reset your password in Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2003 and even Windows Vista possibly but I havn’t tried that one. Using this method it is not possible to find the password just reset it to something else or make it blank.

What you need

The first thing you need to do is download the Emergency Boot CD (EBCD) from ebcd.pcministry.com you will need a CD burning program such as Nero to burn the CD image. Refer to your programs documentation or the EBCD website for information on buring .isos.

Booting from the CD

Once you have the CD created you will need to configure your BIOS to boot from the CD before it boots from the Hard Drive. This is done using the setup program. You enter that from the very first screen you computer shows when you turn it on. Usually it will display a message such as “Press F12 to enter Setup.” Sometimes the key is del or F1 or something entirely different. The Setup option you want to change is boot priority. Change it so that the CD is the first on the list.

Resetting Window’s password

Once you get booted from the CD resetting the password is a piece of cake. Simply select the NT password recovery option from the first screen. Press “Enter” a bunch of times until it asks you important information like which user’s password do you want to change. For the most part it is pretty obvious what you need to do.

I have gone through this process many times on many different machines and it has worked every time. The only times I could imagine that it wouldn’t work would be if the windows was installed on an encrypted file system. If you have a encrypted file system on your computer you probably shouldn’t be resetting passwords anyway.

6 thoughts on “Windows Password Recovery”

  1. If you are referring to the administrators password when trying to use the recovery console, this can happen when things get really corrupted with the registery files or similar file. Backing up your data and reinstalling windows is your best option at this point.

  2. hi got a slight problem with a laptop it has blue screen with code 0xoooooo7B ( 0xf78D2524,0xc0000034, 0x00000000,0x00000000,) but befor i got these i keep getting harddisk security primary master WDC WD5000BEUT-22ZATLock or its WDC WD5000BEVT-22ZATLOCK then when you press enter it says please input password for the above number and yes i have never tried admin, 1111, 1234, but with no luck i have never come across this before so can any body help me please as ive done all i can, thank you

  3. It sounds like your hard drive is locked by the bios in the firmware. Unfortunately this can be very difficult to remove and usually requires replacing the hard drive. If you need to recover the data from the drive you’ll need to send it to a data recovery company which could cost a great deal of money. Hopefully you have a good backup.

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