Lost Passwords
I received 37 Servers from my client. The os is Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server SP4 and Windows 2003 SP1. My task is upgrade them all to Windows 2003 SP2.
The problem is that these are old servers that have been retired. They are going to use them for a test bed environment and nobody has the passwords. I do not want to have to reinstall them all, is there a way to reset the password to blank or retrieve the passwords?
The problem is that these are old servers that have been retired. They are going to use them for a test bed environment and nobody has the passwords. I do not want to have to reinstall them all, is there a way to reset the password to blank or retrieve the passwords?
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ASKER
houssam_ballout, the pogostick worked great on about half of the machines, the other it did not recognize the hard drives therefore did not work. The Machines that I have issues with are HP Proliant DL360, it appears that the popostick does not have the drivers for these machines.
ASKER
Aleghart, I am following my clients instructions, he wants me to upgrade all of these machines to Windows 2003 SP2 and then leave them as is. I am not creating the test environment just updating the servers. He has given me 20 hours to get these updates done, I would not be possible to install 37 machines from scratch in this time frame.
There is no upgrade path for XP. See:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/whyupgrade/supportedpaths.mspx
Also, is there a reason for doing 37 upgrades versus clean install?
For a test environment, how do you know if a bug/problem is due to a fault carried forward from prior installations? (Actually, same applies for a production environment.)
Doing a few machines at a time, I've spent more time on upgrades, un-install, user/group issues, IIS changes, etc. to get three machines to have "identical" loads. Even seemingly minor things like tracking down old anti-virus software and manally un-installing were huge time wasters. Gave up because I was wasting more hours on troubleshooting and testing than spent with one master image that could be cloned to the other machines.
On different hardware you could use something like Acronis Universal Restore, which will update hardware/drivers during a restore to different hardware.