Lost Vista admin password. Help!!!

Well, not exactly lost. My friend and his wife are on the outs. She set her account as admin, and changed the password on his account. I don't know Vista, but I'm thinking he's pretty much SOL, right. Any suggestions I can pass along to him so he can recover his work. About all I can think of is format and reinstall.

 

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You can re-install without a format - all data will be intact. He could slave the HD on another computer and copy the files over(or not even slave it if it is SATA).

There used to be an easy hack/disk for Win2000 admin passwords, this is if the original account was "administrator". Wouldn't surprise me if it still worked for Vista.

 

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You could try this one - I have no idea if it works.

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm#1

 

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Thanks! The program at http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/
that I got to from the link you posted worked perfectly. Now my friend can change his username back to something acceptable in polite company.

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Seriously, I can't post what she changed it to here.

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He could try something like "shithead" for the password, seriously. It could be something simple made to taunt him.

In XP it is simple to remove password protection. If I remember correctly you have to use an admin account to set simple sharing to ON. Then you go to the folder, right click, left click on "sharing and security", then tell it to "share this folder." Then you can set permissions using the button. Set the permissions to allow the admin group full control. Close that window, go to "security" and click on the "advanced" button. Click on "owner" and then you can change the owner of that folder and everything beneath it.

This will also work when you have to rebuild an operating system. I think it's best to start over with a fresh hard drive. This is another thing that your friend can do: He can physically remove the hard drive and put it in a machine that already has an operating system installed, then change those ownerships.

OK, I see that another solution has been achieved, but this is an easy way to do it. I've never been able to get the password to work when I had to change the root drive and rebuild, and this works when you have to do that.