Paging Mr. William Gates!

August 20, 2007 4:08 PM

Help with Windows XP recovery console.

My laptop will not boot. I got a copy of the recovery console but have no idea what to enter for the administrator password. I've tried all the passwords I thought were valid. Without this I can go no further.

Please help!!!

posted by DieHipsterDie to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The Administrator PW is blank by default.

If you can't remember what it is, i use this.
posted by jbroome at 4:56 PM on August 20, 2007

If you end goal is just to copy any important info off the potentially dieing HD, you can get a knoppix liveCD, and get direct access to your original files without any password required.
posted by nomisxid at 5:05 PM on August 20, 2007

HD is fine.

Jb: Does that work for XP also, or just NT?
posted by DieHipsterDie at 5:18 PM on August 20, 2007

Edited to say that jbroome's answer is appreciated but the solution looks confusing as hell.
posted by DieHipsterDie at 5:24 PM on August 20, 2007

The Windows XP Recovery Console is almost completely useless.

Try BartPE.
posted by flabdablet at 5:47 AM on August 21, 2007

The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor works fine on XP, by the way.

It's also included in the Trinity Rescue Kit, along with a wrapper script called winpass. If you boot TRK on the machine whose password you want to reset, type winpass at the command prompt and hit Enter, the Administrator password will be removed.

If your laptop won't boot and you can't log on to the Recovery Console, you may well be looking at a damaged Windows SAM registry file. If that's the case, winpass will probably fail as well. Using the Windows setup CD to do a repair install is proably your easiest fix.
posted by flabdablet at 6:01 AM on August 21, 2007