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Locked out

I have a windows 2000 machine that had the Administrator account renamed. The owner has forgoten the password to all three local accounts on the system. I copied the SAM ran LoPht against it and deciphered three passwords. I have attempted to log onto the machine using the three accounts and corresponding passwords, however the OS will not authenticate. I attempted ERD/Console recover, however that requires the Administrator account to be named administrator. At all cost, I need to avoid a re-install. I have imaged the hard disk. Any help most appreciated.

pmobley

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R_Rajesh

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DanniF

I had the same problem the other day and this tool saved my a$$:

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

Simple floppy boot diskette.

Real easy to use and I have now used it on 3 different machines and it has never failed.

Hope this helps,

Daniel F.

Rich Rumble

If you are unsure as to which account is the administrators... it has a SID of 500. You can use these tools to get that information, and you don't have to have any special privledges.
http://www.chem.msu.su/~rudnyi/NT/ The disk mentioned above an also linked in another thread above is a good util, and it will tell you what account has the SID of what. Little word of caution, DO NOT USE the "TURN OFF SYSKEY" feature of that disk. It is not necessary, ever. I suggest you try it on your ghosted image first, to get fimilar with the disk.

L0pht will also tell you I believe, the sid, it will crack the case sensitive pass (NTLM) as well as the case insensitive (lanman aka LM) hash's
-rich