Safely change Admin password XP NTFS

I've just written my first tutorial, i hope you it helps you.


DONT TOUCH THAT TUTORIAL, Ive been told it sux pretty hardcore.

Ok heres the update, Thanks especialy to Nokia, SirDice and MURACU and everyone. Hers what hapened:

By the time I got SirDice info about SID and takeing ownership, I had already gone ahead, tryed ntpasswd, that didnt work, actualy said there was no Admin password, then I used Partition magic and discovered I can browse the partition, access any folder, and copy from drive to drive.

I got the files the client wanted, Alot of work for 10 dollars! last time I let that happen.

I think Helix will come in handy in the future, as well as the sid and takeing ownership trick.

Long story begins here:

Client origionaly complains about BSOD, I arive, he then informs me a IBM tech had done work on the drive and claimed the drive is very old and delicate. He said the drive would sometimes work and sometimes not, but in either case his mother wants emails from it.

After finaly accessing the folder containing dbx files for outlook, I get them loaded into outlook express and discover a few viruses, erase those then find a freeware program to convert the dbx files into eml files. So anyway after hours of removeing viruses, emails (they speak aribic and some emails didnt export properly) I finaly get them saved to CD.

I then offer to formate the drive, for 10 dollars (mistake), but anyway, drive wont formate, forget the error. So I fdisk and display partitions, discover two, delete both, reboot, create primary DOS, and try to format but nope, drive seems completly unrecognized now in BIOS, and some MBR loader was loaded into memory.

So client claims it was either a Dell computer or IBM, dosent look like either. But Hard drive seems somehow propietary.

I noticed during check that fdisk does, it stoped at 23% a few times. Bad sectors mayby? but scandisk even failed.

NTpass always works for me but lately i've enjoyed using a liveBSD boot disk. navigate to /mnt/ntfs.1 and then just take what i need. gzip then send to the ftpserver running on my workstation.

you could probably use bartPE to put the data onto a thumb drive

Sorry I need to reword that, its not realy that ntpasswd didnt work, or that it wasnt able to reset the password, its more a mistake on my part, I assumed because the drive was NTFS and I was unable to access folders, that this was because I needed a password. When I used ntpasswd, it remarked that Administrator problably had no password. But in the end Partition magic alowed me to access the folders and as ive now learned, its because of SID missmatch not passwords.

I did try ntpasswd afterwards on my own drive and was able to erace one of my acount passwords. Sorry for any confusions.