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Forgot password

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by b_p2001

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How do I override the password? I want to patition my drive and install Win98 on a formatted FAT32 partitioned drive, but since I forgot the password, NT will not let me install the Seevice Pack 6a to do the partitioning.
I have only a laptop withNT on it, so I will not be able to install a second version of NT on the server. Is it possible?
Does anyone have any real answers? All this ever gets me is forwarded to web pages where I spend countless hours searching over tedious articles, and if I'm lucky hit one that pertains to my question. This is fine if I find the answer I'm looking for, however if I miss a click or click the wrong link and get lost, I will not award the points. Is this fair?
I have a 95 & 98 boot disk with the CD ROM drivers to format the drive C:, however since NT is NTFS, the boot disk does not read the C: drive and I still am unable to format it.

14 replies

by hacbmis

If you don't have anything important on the primary drive, I would suggest backup the data on harddrive and reinstalling NT. That way you can reset the password. If you just can't get into NT call microsoft if you have a registed version there should be no problem.

by dmiles

Reference the following sites that may be of help
1)http://home.eunet.no/~pnoradhl/ntpasswd
2)www.mirider.com/ntaccess.html
3)www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000172.htm
4)www.netguru.net/_disc1/0000017d.htm
The only other option is to reinstall the OS

by timthetoolman

Hi,

Well as it turns out, getting in to WinNt wont help unless you're planning to install Win98 on another partition as a n addition to your machine.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that you cant go backwards on NTFS - back to FAT32. You can only re-format it as FAT32.

And secondly you cant reformat the drive that NT exists on anyway. It wont let you.

What you should probably do is boot using the Win98 CD and use it to do the partitioning and formating... I'm sure I've done this before from that CD but the tools available are primitive and will only allow you to partition and format the whole disk.

This should be what you want, though so go for it!

If you want to break into WinNT to create a *second* partition to put Win98 onto, then you dont have a lot of choices.

You need to be able to write to the NTFS drive to break in - this either means using a bootable floppy with the following software on it...

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml

(remove spaces from the above URL)

...or installing another version of NT on it (which you said you cant do)

...or moving the drive into another machine that is capable of writing to NTFS.

Beyond those options, you have little hope of breaking in - short of guessing your administrator's password.

Once you get write access to the drive, then I'm sure one of soulrider's links will show you what to do. But in a nutshell, you replace the screen saver .scr file with usermanager for domains...

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Tim.

by allan

Try booting from the Win98 CD. Run FDISK and Delete the NON-DOS partition. That will get rid of the NTFS partition. Once you restart, Win98 setup will see the unpartitioned disk and set up its own FAT32 partition. Good luck!

by bmccool

Okay free commercial :)
If money isn't an option...
Give ERD commander a try, you and mount the NTFS
volume and change any password you want.
Then reboot as normal with the new password

www.sysinternals.com

by shmaltz

If you are trying to delete the NT partition so you can install Win9x and you don't have the administrative password for the NT partition:
1. Boot up to the WINNT setup media that you have (Floppy's or CD).
2. Run the setup like this is a clean install, when you arrive at the choose partition selection, Delete the current C drive.
3. Create a new C drive but don't format it.
4. Shut down your computer (I don't care how CTRL + ALT + DEL is fine with me, so is pulling the power of you building).
5. Boot to the Windows 9x media (or any Windows 98 start up Disk).
6. Run Fdisk (by typing FDISK at the prompt), make sure the partitions are right.
7. Run format C:
8. Run the installation.
Please note: you cannot run FDISK before deleting the NTFS partition using the WINNT setup, Since FDISK doesn't recognize it.

If you are trying to resize the WinNT partition so you can dual boot to Win9x:
If you don't have the NT admins password:
1. Boot the computer using a Lynux boot disk (floppy, there are thousends available out there, that can recognize your NTFS partition plus you IDE drive).
2. Once you can access the NT partition, rename the file Logon.SCR to logon.old.
3. Copy the file CMD.exe to logon.scr (they are both locatedunder the C:\WINNT\System32 subfolder.
4. Restart your computer booting into NT.
5. Don't touch the mouse and or keyboard for a few minutes (so the logon.scr = a.k.a. cmd.exe = gets activated)
6. Change the administrative password using the net command.
7. Restart again booting into NT, Reverse steps 2 & 3.
8. Install a program that can resize your partition (My favorite: Power Quests voulume manager), and relocate the unused space to a new partition.
9. Install a boot loader, that will allow you to choose between 2 OS's
If you do know the NT password just start at step 8.

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