A couple of days ago, I was asked to help one of the technical demonstrator solve a problem. Apparently the master book record for the machine had become corrupted and they needed to repair it, without nuking the whole machine. Ok, that doesn’t sound too hard, put the Windows XP install CD into the machine, boot it and go into the recovery console. Upon entering the recovery console, you are prompted for the administrator’s password. This is where we came across a small problem. The password had been changed some how, and the user couldn’t remember what it had been changed to. So now we’re faced with the problem of needing to reset the administrator’s password on a machine that won’t boot. After a quick Google search I came across “Austumi”, which is a small Linux distro that allows you to monkey around with windows settings including resetting user’s passwords. It’s pretty straight forward to use, and does the job nicely. I hope you don’t ever find yourself in this situation, but if you do then give Austumi a whirl.
