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Recovering Administrator Password
I've just started as a volunteer at a local community group, working as the IT guy. It seems I've walked into a place that is in some disarray, at least with regards to its IT setup.
My immediate problem is that their main server has two administrator IDs as well as one regular user account but only the password of the regular user account - which does NOT have administrator privileges - has a known password. Although there are passwords written down for the two administrator IDs, they do not work. The director of the organization strongly suspects that the previous IT person, who "didn't work out", has changed the passwords on her way out the door; apparently the passwords did work recently.
I'm trying to figure out how to recover or change the password on the administrator IDs. I've done some Googling and found instructions that say to reboot into Safe Mode, then change the Administrator passwords from there. Unfortunately, when I do that, the first thing I see after entering Safe Mode is a panel showing the two Administrator IDs and insisting on the password for either ID. Since I know neither ID, I am at a loss as to how to proceed.
Other googling has revealed a bunch of suggestions for dealing with this problem, all involving using freeware or paid services that are supposed to hack the administrator passwords. Each of these suggestions comes endorsed by someone who says the solution worked perfectly for them but each seems to be followed by denunciations that the technique didn't work for them or even damaged their systems. Each person making these claims swears to be disinterested and not an employee or agent of the company providing the solution but I'm not sure I believe them.
I'm also concerned about some of the dire warnings I'm seeing about these various solutions. For example, some of the solutions seem to put encrypted files at risk of being lost. I am the ONLY IT person involved with the organization now and the other people apparently don't know if there are any encrypted files on the system. Unfortunately, I'm in somewhat over my head on this. My strengths are in programming, database, and web design, not Windows administration, so I really don't know how to determine if there are encrypted files on the server. If there aren't, maybe the risk of using one of these hack-solutions is not so grave, in which case I might try some of the free solutions first and then move on to the paid solutions if the free ones don't work.
I'd really appreciate some advice here from people that are more knowledgeable about Windows.
For what it's worth, the computers at the organization, which is a non-profit, are a mix of Windows XP and 7 machines. The main server, which is the one I'm trying to access, is running Windows XP Professional Version 2002 SP3. (I suppose I should be asking this on an XP forum but I'm hoping someone here will remember the techniques of XP administration well enough to help with this.)
I expect to ask several more questions as I get oriented to this new job but this is probably the most critical one right now. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!
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