Password in XP Pro

Hi,
Some one got in to our computers at work and somehow changed the administrator passwords on two of the three XP Pro computers there, (several people got fired under suspicion of theft) now we can only log in as users. Is there any way to go in and redo the administrator passwords. I have a suspician not.

Does anyone think if we called Microsoft, and proved who we were they would have a work around?

I did change a hard drive on one machine and did a reinstall of XP Pro, but of course we lost all of the data (backed up on CD's) and it took a half day to do. And reinstall Peachtree and Office and the backups etc.

dbm

 

Microsoft has no supportable way to reset passwords, there for we can't help you either.
I bet though if you search google for hints to your problem, you can find a product for purchase that will help you.
I would recommend just to reinstall.

 

Thanks for your reply

dbm

 

Thanks for your reply,

Unfortunately whoever installed the XP on those computers is long gone and probably suspected in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud.

We have decided to go the route of recovering the hard drives data via a professional data recovery service. Hopefully they can get in to the drives copy the data, and we can install it on new Drives with new installs of XP Pro and apps.

In the mean time, we have the Peachtree data backups on a New Hard Drive so we can continue on with our daily accounting.

I am just the poor old estimator called to the front office because I understand computer hard and software better than the rest of the staff. But I am no software programming expert by any means.

Anyway thanks and we can close this thread

dbm

 

If you are on a network with other 2K/XP machines, you may be able to recover remotely. If the network setup is a DOMAIN and anyone has a domain admin account, you certainly can. Fairly easily done too with no need for any seriously tech network knowledge.

You will still need to wipe and reload XP on the problem PCs but you would have the data from them so that wouldn't be a major crisis.

 

Thanks again,

We disconnected all computers from the network because they were remotely starting, ( and the remote wake up on ring etc were all disabled in BIOS too) and random events were occurring, so we isolated all of them and we really do not need networking. We have come up with a solution. And one more thing, the day we disconnected the computers from the internet and lan, the suspected fruad people were said to have called around to some folks in the know associated with our company asking what was going on there. Those folks had their computer experts configure our systems. So it is isolation for each PC from now on, witrh CD's for files moving, until I can build new computers and re connect.

I think we can close this thread.

dbm