Performed major surgery on my NT4 sp6a workstation. Before doing so, I did full backup on Colorado TR4 tape drive. In trying to reconfigure everything I changed admin password to make loggin in multiple times easier. Then, in changing it back, decided to change it from the original. Trying to log in today, my stomach dropped when it said invalid pw. Is there a way to restore the old pw from the tape?

Just to add: I am currently logged in with "User" privledges, not Admin. I only had that one account in the Administrators group.

If you have another computer available, drop the hard drive in that one as a slave and delete the "SAM" file. It will reset the admin password to be blank.

http://www.computing.net/windowsnt/wwwboard/forum/17360.html and have read there. Post-1 offers a couple of options - one is the Linux boot-disk approach; the other an approach via a temp version install. Either should get you going - only cost is time/effort??? Note: deleting the SAM file means 'all' accounts info goes... so all accounts have to be regenerated/re-established.

I have a program that will let you give any user admin rights. It is freeware, email me to let me know

Do you have an ER Disk? If so use L0phtcrack to extract the admin password. Depending on how your password policy (ie: names, common phrases or mixed case, alphas, and numerics) it may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days.

Thanks for the posts you guys. Turns out it was my workstation's connection to the pc I thought I had forgot the pw on. As strange as it sounds, I couldn't log into any shares from my workstation because it would say bad password on the pc I was trying to connect to. Knowing I had changed the pw a day previous to that, I figured I must have mistyped. I walked up to the pc, entered user and password and it worked fine. I rebooted the pc I was trying to connect from, and then it was able to connect again. It was the strangest thing.