XP Pro has a mind of its own....

Alright here is the situation. I recently installed both RH 7.3 (ext3) along with XP Pro(NTFS) on my laptop with Grub as the boot loader. well anywayz everything worked like butta until today when I went to log into XP Pro, and my password didnt' work. I'm the sole user of this laptop and i'm 100% positive I'm using the right password. (and yes caps lock is off :)

Could it be that Linux somehow messed with the windows files. Considering I have heard that ext3 doestn' work well, and most people have to resort to FAT32. But this is besides the point, here is my question. Since I have RH working on a partition, is it possible to reset the Winblows password from the linux partition. I mean I heard it could be done from a linux floppy, but my Laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.

Thanks guys

cheers

You said that your password doesn't work for your specific account. I'm assuming, since you said you are the sole user, that you didn't create any other accounts. I wonder, however, about the administrator's password? If you didn't set up a administrative password, then the default password is blank. Try looging in as Administrator with a blank password. It should work. I've never heard of a Linux installation messing up a Windows password (especially since I doubt you recompiled the kernel to support NTFS so Linux can't even access the partition if you wanted to do anything to it). Try my Administrator tip. If that doesn't work, do a search of the archives to find out about password resetting options. Since you don't have a floppy drive, you can create a bootable CD-ROM with the same files which you would place on a floppy, allowing you to bypass the floppy issue. Good luck!

AJ

About recompiling and NTFS... My Mandrake 9.0 supports NTFS out of the box. It didn't foind the drive by default, though. I had to mount it.

But I don't know how to reset the Windows password through Linux (or any other way). Google around and see what you can find. But if you don't find a Linux app that acutally does the job for you, I figiure it's probably difficult to reset the password manually.

My two øre (norwegian currency :))

try this

u:administrator
p:

u:*whatever you put for your name*
p:

U:administrator
p:*your password*

u:*your name*
p:*your password*

some of this may be a little obvious, but sometimes you have the right pass word and the wrong name, or whatever.... hope this at least somewhat helped

Good advice everyone. But I have the following things to add.
1) To access the administrator account, press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice at the XP welcome screen and at the login prompt that you get, enter "administrator" as the username and try various a blank password and your usual password. Make sure that you spell administrator right, I get that wrong quite often.
2) avdven, since XP became popular, many distros have enabled NTFS support in their default kernel.
3) proactive, even if NTFS support is enabled, you can't do crap because NTFS support under Linux is Read Only. Read/Write Support is experimental and HIGHLY DANGEROUS and under no circumstances should you enable it.
4) Here's a way to reset the Windows NT/2K/XP password http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html . It works most of the time, but people have fux0red their systems using it. So use it only as the last resort as you may have to reinstall XP after this anyway. Also, since you don't have a floppy drive, you will have to download the ISO and burn it to CD (I assume you have a CD-ROM drive).

Cheers,
cgkanchi

I think your logging in on a different account then when you installed windows xp. try this

When you come to the XP Pro login screen, move the cursor over a name, then push control-alt-delete-delete. :eek: ~~ Type administrator in the user name and put your password in.

:[pong]Hope it works![/pong] ;)

Adven hit the nail on the head in my situation. I had the same problem with xp pro about a week ago. I searched and googled and what have you to find a way to get around "administrator" password--- I broke a cardinal rule by allowing someone else use my computer while away and they downloaded "netware". I tried to log on with every conceivable variable---nothing worked. It kept denying me access and said "must uninstall--client services for netware." Couldn't do that b-cuz I couldn't log on. Finally, someone told me to leave the password blank---ta-dah !I was able to log in and delete the problem. Chances are that there is no password set up for your R.H. and you won't be able to log on when there is no password ... try leaving the password blank ----good luck !

Plus just as a side note, if you can't get in when you get to the Windows login screen, maybe try going to safe mode and then try logging in. You could have a sort of virus or something stupid enabled that would be keeping you from logging in correctly. Or as I've seen, something that boots up and screws up the configuration of the keyboard (which I've only seen happen on laptops for some reason).

Just a thought...