I bought a laptop off ebay, (IBM T23) and There is a login screen with dbaadmin for a login, and i do not know the password. I can not log into my new computer, can someone help me out? do i need a boot disk? can i go through bios config? there has to be something to do if you forget your password. PLEASE HELP!! Thanks.

Contact the person you got it from, and Ebay about the problem. There is nothing else you can do short of reinstalling the OS.

There is no simple sollution to this. First try to guess the password. Try: 1. no password, just click OK 2. password, pass, dbaadmin, admin, administrator, ibmt23, etc 3. try to contact the seller and ask him. If there was critical data on it, you could do a parallel install of 2000 to a different directory. Since you just bought this computer, I don't see any sense in doing it that way. Windows NT, 2000, XP are designed this way, so an unauthorized person cannot get access to your valuable data. If the hard drive is formatted fat32 then you could boot from a Windows 98 boot floppy to get access to the hard drive, but ultimately you would still need the password, or to reinstall the operating system to get it up and running.

No, he doesn't need to reinstall the OS. I agree that contacting the guy he bought it from is the best bet. If that fails, and this is a new pc, at least to you, I would reinstall the OS but it is not necessary to reinstall to gain access, especially it is the FAT32 file system. If so, boot with a 98 boot disk and delete the SAM file in the Windows\config folder. This is just a lost password issue. It is the most common question asked in here. Do a search in this forum and you'll get all sorts of responses.

how about NTFS? where do i delete the SAM if i lose the local administrator password?

If you delete the sam file you lose ALL passwords and user accounts. They will all have to be set-up again. If the org win2k cd did not come with the laptop you prolly have bought a stolen system, congrats! Passwords are there for a reason and for those reasons they are not easy to hack/crack even if you do "forget" one. My advise, send it back and get your money refunded, then buy from a legit source. It's worth the money in the long run, "you get what you pay for".

DO NOT delete the SAM file if it is NTFS... BUT...how do you determine whether or not it's NTFS or FAT32 if you can't log in? You MIGHT see it during the boot process, it may flash on the screen, but that depends on how the boot up process is set up... You can get a copy of NTFSDOS, put it on a floppy then boot up with it, and copy the sam file to that floppy... Then transfer that floppy to another computer, copy the sam file to the desktop or wherever, then find a copy fo l0phcrack, and it will eventually crack the password... OR...get a copy of Cain & Able, install it on a different computer, SLAVE your laptop HD to the other computer and run Cain & Able...I think it will find the pw... Other lthan that, re-install w2k Good luck Steve