help locked out help wiz!!!

[DON ENGLE]

compaq laptop wife came running in to music room screaming I am locked out here fix it have no idea how to unlock windows2000pro no book no disc no luck please help if you can. cant divorce her 43 yrs senority thanks Don

[Storm Rosson]

exactly what do u mean by "unlock"?

[Wiz Feinberg]

You haven't given me much to go by; like the exact message associated with the lockout.

Did her password expire and has she selected a new one to replace it? Has anything been added to that PC very recently? What was she doing immediately before the "lockout?" Was the computer on or off before the lockout message?

[DON ENGLE]

a box came up on the screen saying the computer is in use and has been locked only preffered customer or administrator can unlock then it wants a password which she tried but nothing happened thanks Don

[John Cipriano]

It's possible that you have a password but you have auto-login turned on so you've never had to type it in. Then if someone changed the lockout policy or standby or screensaver settings, you could be faced with a prompt.

You need to figure out the password for the relevant account, or this could keep happening to you.

The tools for this may be more advanced than you're used to but if you can't remember or find the password then I can try to walk you through using some of them.

Probably the simplest is ntpasswd.
You use it to blank out your administrator password (or whichever account happens to be the problem):
http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It requires you to make a boot CD or floppy, for which you need either CD burner or floppy drive, and in the CD case you need some burning software (which you can get for free). Then after log back in, you just change the password to something you will remember.

Unless anyone else has any other suggestions?

[Wiz Feinberg]

a box came up on the screen saying the computer is in use and has been locked only preffered customer or administrator can unlock then it wants a password which she tried but nothing happened thanks Don :mrgreen:

This is what happens when someone uses a Windows 2000 computer, then either "locks the account" on purpose, or allows the screen saver settings to lock the computer and require a password to unlock it. It also occurs if one logs out of their account and leaves the machine on. The logon box will sit there, behind a floating screensaver, waiting for proper credentials to be inputted.

Note, that if the user account does not have a specific password assigned to that user, simply hitting enter at the login screen should get you into it. Check the User Name field to see if it is the account she normally uses.

If the Administrator password is known, you can login as Administrator, right-click on My Computer, select Manage > Users and Groups > Users. Find her account name and change the password to something she can remember, repeat it in the confirm password field and apply it. Log off the Admin account and try logging into the user account your wife uses.

[Wiz Feinberg]

I dread to mention this, but a lockout will also occur if somebody, or bot, or Worm, tries to hack into a Windows 2000 Professional computer, more than x number of times (as preset by the "group policy" login options).

Ask her if it is possible that somebody had access to the PC when she was not present. Also, ask if a thumbdrive was plugged into it just before this lockout occurred, or, if it was connected to an outside network.

If the answer to either of the last two questions is yes, scan the PC with MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, for evidence of the Conficker Worm.

[Jack Stoner]

Doing some research for an XP user that forgot their password, Microsoft states the only option is to reinstall. If there were a way (there are probably some hacks) to reset the password then it's not really secure and anyone potentially could get access.

On a side note, on most Desktops if the BIOS is password protected and misplaced usually there is a way to reset the BIOS password. But on Dell laptops there is no option and if a user forgets the BIOS password they must call Dell to get it reset. The reason Dell did this is because of the number of Laptops that are lost/stolen. When someone calls Dell to get the password reset they must be the registered (registered with Dell) owner and be ablt to prove it.

[winston]

oops, I did not read this was a laptop, sorry.

[Cal Sharp]

I had this problem with a desktop once, and I took out the battery for a minute, which reset the BIOS.

[Wiz Feinberg]

Don;
Have you had any luck guessing the Administrator password? If so you can logon to the Administrator account and change the password for her user account.

[John Cipriano]

You're right, Jack. Passwords are good security against casual intruders and people accessing the machine over the network, but in the absence of file encryption you don't actually need the password to get at the files on the drive.

This includes the registry, which contains a hash of the passwords for each account. There are many offline tools for blanking it (one of which I included above), decrypting it, or even patching the kernel in RAM to ignore it completely.

All of this underscores the usefulness of encrypting at least your user folder, and for a machine in a sensitive environment, the whole drive. Once you do that, though, you can't forget the password!

Funny story...on old Unix machines they used to just store the passwords in a file called /etc/passwd and if its permissions weren't set properly, any user could just take a peek at it. Also the default password type for XP is stored in 7-byte chunks to be compatible with older systems. So in terms of fending off brute force decryption, it's useless to have a longer one unless you disable the old style hashes.

[DON ENGLE]

many thanks to all who participated in this adventure the laptop is unlocked and working fine Cal Sharp had the winning advice and the easiest for me to do double dittos to you Cal.and thanks to bob and this forum for all they do for us steel players

you can close this for now thanks to all again
Don

[Wiz Feinberg]

many thanks to all who participated in this adventure the laptop is unlocked and working fine Cal Sharp had the winning advice and the easiest for me to do double dittos to you Cal.and thanks to bob and this forum for all they do for us steel players

you can close this for now thanks to all again
Don :D

Don;
Are you saying that Cal's advice to remove the CMOS battery is what solved this problem? That implies that there was a password set in the bootup process, in the BIOS. If not, what did unlock the laptop?

I will close the thread after you reveal the fix.

[DON ENGLE]

hi wiz yes removing the battery cleared everything Ireplaced it and everything works fine no more problems yet Don