logon problem

I have a Dell Latitude laptop with Windows 2000 Professional. I can not logon, as it asks for a user name and password. I have never installed a password. I've tried all kinds of names, passwords, tried hitting escape, tried ctrl-alt-del, nothing gets me past this screen. Help! brady524

 

Hi Brady524
Welcome to the boards.
Does this thread help at all?

Daizy

 

Daizy-I tried holding down shift while booting (turning on power, starting up?) as your thread advised, but it did not work. Any other suggestions?

Thanks
brady524

 

brady524 - the NT systems are designed to not allow users on unless they have an account and know the password. The various tricks that allowed you to bypass logon with 9X systems just don't work on NT.

Afraid you won't get any help here either as the forum policy (Rule #6) prohibits anyone from posting possible ways to get around password protection. Anyone posting such would be warned on first occurance and banned on second.

 

If you never assigned a password, you can log on using the user name that was created when w2k was installed. To find it, boot with a DOS floppy. DOS will be able to read the drive as long as it is not NTFS file system. If the drive is NTFS, you can download the NTFSDOS utility from sysinternals, which will read the drive. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings (under DOS, folder names will be abbreviated), and the subfolder names will include the names of Users (ignore the All Users and Default User subfolders). Enter one of those user names (either Administrator or the remaining one) into the logon window and leave password blank. You should then be able to log on. If a password has, in fact, been assigned, this of course will not work and you should call Dell tech support...