Ask The Admin

I was able to use the cd image below to reset an administrators password to blank and then log in to a machine whose owner recently died.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (v060213 - February 2006)
Petter Nordahl-Hagen has written a Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista offline password editor:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd

This is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista system, by modifying the encrypted password in the registry's SAM file.
You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.
It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppy disk or CD. The boot-disk includes stuff to access NTFS partitions and scripts to glue the whole thing together.
Works with syskey (no need to turn it off, but you can if you have lost the key)
Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled user accounts!
Caution: If used on users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or later service packs on W2K, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless you remember the old password again!
Download links:
cd070409.zip (~3MB) - Bootable CD image with newer drivers
bd050303.zip (~1.1MB) - Bootdisk image, date 050303.
sc050303.zip(~1.4MB) - SCSI-drivers (050303) (only use newest drivers with newest bootdisk, this one works with bd050303)
To write these images to a floppy disk you'll need RawWrite2 which is included in the Bootdisk image download. To create the CD you just need to use your favorite CD burning program and burn the .ISO file to CD.

_TheOnAndOffLineAdmin_