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Wipe admin password in XP but only via floppy?

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pamphonica

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Jan 29, 2015
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I am trying to run up a small embedded PC (National Instruments PentiumIII/512Mb) running XP. It was sold as "password wiped" but it is sadly not!
Admin/administrator have had their passwords set. This tiny pc only has a floppy drive (and USB, but not sure about USB drivers yet).

Can anyone give me an easy way to wipe the password, using just a floppy drive for software load? Most password recovery software is rather large for a floppy!

I suppose I could try to get it to read software from a USB stick. But the net is full of conflicting suggestions on password recovery, most assuming a CDROM drive.

I don't really want to reinstall XP as there may be essential and irreplaceable drivers in there currently.

Any help or suggestions?

Many thanks
Jeremy
 
pamphonica said:
I suppose I could try to get it to read software from a USB stick. But the net is full of conflicting suggestions on password recovery, most assuming a CDROM drive.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure chntpw is what I have used in the past for this task. I probably burned the software to a CD and booted from that, but there are directions on how to write it to a USB drive and boot from that. If the BIOS of the system supports booting from a USB drive, give that a try.

http://www.chntpw.com/
http://www.chntpw.com/download/
http://www.chntpw.com/burn-to-cd-usb/
http://www.chntpw.com/guide/
 
If it was sold as "password wiped" then pester the original seller for support.

No harm in continuing to resolve the issue yourself though.

Dave
 
I have a boot floppy that can reset the administrator password. It's unix-based so is rather terse and text-only. I also have a CD version.

Unfortunately I don't have any image of the disks, just the disks themselves. But, so you know, the capability exists.
 
A system that “modern” would likely have a hard drive that could be read with an IDE to USB adapter. Then just run your password tool from a more modern computer.
 
Don't even need a floppy disc. Just boot it into safe mode command prompt only...

Then at the command prompt use the following command:

net user username ""

with username being the account name. It will clear the password. Then reboot.
 
Thanks for all the helpful replies.
- the password is set in OS, not Bios
- I have tried all the usual suspects for passwords
- I can't get to safe mode CMD as it still keeps asking me for username/password first
- I bought this device about 5 years ago! I can't even find the seller details.
- I think that I may have to mount the HDD elsewhere and run password recovery there.

-Jeremy
 
OK, I found the solution. The "Offline NT Password and Registry Editor" site still has the images for the floppy boot version (as well as CD and USB).
This was booted up and it allowed me to clear the admin password, I am now able to log in successfully.
Hopefully this excellent tiny linux boot disk will help out someone else who follows this thread!
Thanks all
-Jeremy
 
That looks like the one I used. At that time if you set a password to not-blank, it wouldn't work. No idea if that's been fixed since then.
 
Robbbert said:
That looks like the one I used. At that time if you set a password to not-blank, it wouldn't work. No idea if that's been fixed since then.
Click to expand...
I've always used "password" when asked by the system just so it wouldn't be blank and accidently get filled with something I would never be able to figure out.
 
pamphonica said:
OK, I found the solution. The "Offline NT Password and Registry Editor" site still has the images for the floppy boot version (as well as CD and USB).
This was booted up and it allowed me to clear the admin password, I am now able to log in successfully.
Hopefully this excellent tiny linux boot disk will help out someone else who follows this thread!
Thanks all
-Jeremy
Click to expand...
I used to use this in web hosting all the time many moons ago, if a customer or employee was thoroughly locked out of a system.

We had one recurring group of professional spammers who would purchase windows servers, load everything into a truecrypt volume, change admin to lock us out, and spam away. The ID, state, IP, etc was always different, but the mode of operation was always that. They had to know our only reasonably easy way in was to reboot the system and use ntpasswd, because in doing so, it of course closes/locks the truecrypt volume. The spam is stopped, but the files are also essentially never to be recovered.

/storytime

Glad you got it sorted :)
 
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