Lost administrator password

Gort9k · Post by **Gort9k** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 7:04 am

A couple of days ago I had to change the administrator password in a laptop running Win Xp Pro. As nobody knew what the old password was I use a copy of Winternals and set up a new password.

My question is: Why it is so hard (impossible) to find out the administrator password in Win XP? As I see it, if there is a program (winternals, in this case) that can do the change, the password must be stored in a known location inside Windows?. What is more; it has to be a way to retrieve that password in order to change it. So why everybody says you can NOT find an administrator pasword in Windows XP?

Surely it is a silly question, but I can not understand it

Matt615 · Post by **Matt615** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 10:03 pm

Used to be able to do this on NT systems, I think you can still do it with XP systems since they are build on the NT platform, but if use a bootdisk to the get the SAM file off the computer you should be able to use a utility to get the password out of there...

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Try that...