Reset administrator and other user passwords in Windows XP etc

Posted July 4th, 2008 in Windows

A few days ago a friend of mine found her old Windows XP laptop and decided to use it, but couldn't work out what her password was. We needed to reset the password so I searched the Internet for a solution and found Petter Nordahl-Hagen's Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista offline password editor.

You can download the CD image by visiting his site at the address below:

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

Being the cautious person I am when it comes to messing around with settings like this on a computer, I first tested it out with a Windows XP install running under VMWare. The CD boots up and is running some basic Linux variant and has pretty clear step by step instructions about what you are doing. You have the options to either change the password to something new or reset it to a blank password.

I decided to reset the administrator user's passwords to blank; once I had done this and rebooted back into Windows, I was able to log in as both the regular user and the administrator successfully. From here you can set up new passwords rather than leaving them blank.

Please note that using a utility like this can cause damage to your Windows files so you should use it as a last resort and with caution.

One final thing to note is that the disk must be clean, i.e. you need to have shut Windows down correctly, otherwise the password reset tool will have to mount the disks in read-only mode and any changes will not be saved. The easiest way to ensure the disk is clean is to start Windows up, then use the shutdown button on the login screen. Then boot from the CD.