Security

Ask something
Discussion Locked

XP Password Lock-out

0 helpful
3 replies

by jpretlow 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I exceeded the number of allowed Password violations on my XP Professional desktop and have locked out my ID for 42 days. I am running Fat 32 and do not have any personal settings that I am concerned about losing. I do not have a separate administrator sign-on established. I also did not create a password diskette. How can I either reestablish my acount that is locked out or establish a new account. As an aside, I have the entire harddrive established as a share on my home network, so I can write to the hard drive, if that is of any benefit.

Thanks in advance

3 replies

by timwalsh

You may be under a misconception. The account lockout duration policy is set in minutes. This policy by default is not defined. Unless you manually defined this setting and set it to 60480 minutes (42days X 24 hours X 60 minutes), you aren't locked out for 42 days. This setting is only available if you enable the account lockout threshhold and set it to a number above zero (default is zero = no lockout). If you did set an account lockout threshhold (above 0), the default lockout duration is 30 minutes.
What you may be referring to is the "Maximum Password Age", which by default is set to 42 days. This setting refers to how often your password must be changed.

I have seen 2 different account setup routines. With an upgrade install of XP, you asked to provide a password that is applied to the default Administrator acoount. With a new machine setup (from Dell), you are asked to supply a name for at least one user account. The first account is given computer administrator privileges. Only an administrator can create a new user account. If this is your case and you have forgotten this password, your only recourse will be to reinstall the operating system.

Hope this helps.

This discussion is closed to new replies.