Lost Admin password Win XP home

Hello,

A friend of mine yesterday did some repairs to his OS and installed an Admin Password, now he would have had to have typed this twice, and yet he can no longer get pass the screen asking him for his password, when he boots up.

He swears he is using the password, ( caps on or off ), he set but can't get in.

I know this guy, it would have been a simple password, he has been at it for hours, how can he resolve this, he cannot afford to reinstall and loose all his studies or pay for third party software, can anyone help?

I should add his system came loaded with XP installed so he only has a recovery disk.
Johanus

Is it Home or Pro?

Did he password protect the Main Admin Account? Or just a User Admin account?

Passwords are case sensitive. Don't know exactly what is meant by caps on or off .

Anyway about the only hope here (short of a reinstall) is that he was working with a User account and not the main.

In Home the Main is only visible and accessible in Safe Mode.

Boot into Safe Mode to access the Main Administrator acct. The password will
be blank if you never set one up. You should be able to access the first acct.


All you need to do is press ctrl/alt/del twice at the XP welcome
screen in Pro and then Enter administrator for the user name and the
appropriate password to log into the built in admin account. Safe
mode is not required in Pro.


If the password in question was the main account then reinstalling (restoring) would be necessary.

Hi Jephree,

I'll ask him in the morning and post back, I suspect it a reinstalling job for him, he is going to loose so much data.
Johanus.

Hello Jephree,

Just an up date, nothing worked, he had to do a reinstall using a recovery disk.
Johanus

Thanks for the update Johanus!

Let us know if we can help further in the future!




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