A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to look at his daughter’s laptop. She had changed her vista password and then managed to forget not only the new password but what the hint she had set even meant! So she had a laptop she couldn’t access with her school project work needed in three days and no backup. I didn’t hold out much hope apart from reinstalling Vista. There was no recovery disk for the Sony laptop so it would have been a fresh install and a case of hunt-the-driver to get it all working again, hopefully leaving her data intact.
However, I found a solution in the ‘Offline NT Password and Registry Editor’…
You can obtain the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor on it’s own bootable CD here but I also found it on a more useful multi-purpose rescue CD called the Ultimate Boot CD and this is the disk I will explain how to use here to reset your XP or Vista password.
First you need to download the ISO image for the CD and burn it to a blank CD. Boot off the CD and then follow the steps below:
2. Select Filesystem Tools –> NTFS Tools –> Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.
3. Select the correct partition for your windows installation. The default was correct for my purposes.
4. Type in the path to the registry or press enter for the default which again was correct for my purpose.
5. Select ‘Password Reset’.
6. Select ‘1′ for ‘Edit user data and passwords’.
7. Enter the user you wish to reset the password for.
8. Select the option to set the password to blank. It is safer to blank the password then change it later in windows than to change it using the editor.
9. type ‘q’ to quit and it will ask you to save any changes.
10. Remove the CD and reboot and you should be able to get back into windows to change the password to something memorable!
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