Help with Windows 2000

[Pat McCarthy]

I messed up my dad's computer.
It's a Dell Inspiron 8100 running Windows 2000 Professional.
I was trying to set up a network between it and my laptop and I changed it from the domain it was on, to a workgroup that my laptop was set to.

Normally, I would think this wouldn't be a problem. However, I forgot to take into account that at his last place of employment, an IT guy made it so he had to log in and it was tied to the domain that I changed off of. Now we can't log in to Windows.

I have already tried booting into safe mode, but it still prompts the log in screen. There also appears to be no way to change anything other than user name and password on the log in window.

If anyone has suggestions as to how I can bypass the logging in part to change it back to the way it was, I would greatly appreciate it.

[maltz1881]

Not sure if this would help or not but can you take out the battery?

[Nate Smith]

In safe mode, the login is looking for the local administrator account(despite the domain settings, there is still a local admin account). If you know the information to get into that account, you should be able to get yourself up and running.

[Tristan Lall]

First, check to see at the login screen if there's a text box with the old domain, and a dropdown menu that allows you to select the local computer instead. If that's there, attempt to log on locally, using the same user name and password.

If that doesn't work, and presuming that he owns the laptop (it sounds this way, but you wouldn't necessarily want to mess with a corporate computer), you'll probably want to try something like resetting the local administrator password with a SAM file editor. Try this for a summary, and this for the de facto standard tool for doing it.

Now, before you go doing that, ask whether NTFS encryption (the built-in encryption scheme in Windows, a.k.a. EFS) was not used on anything important. If it was used, you'll find that the encryption actually works, and you'll lose the data protected with it.

Also, if there's anything remotely important on that computer, you're going to want to consider making a backup image (i.e. copy of the data structure, not just the data) of the hard drive. That way, if you screw up, you won't lose it all. You'll of course need some way of reading that drive on another computer, and a way to run the imaging software. Maxtor MaxBlast is free, and works if you plan to plug it into a desktop that already contains a Maxtor, Seagate, or maybe Quantum hard drive. (Acronis TrueImage is the commercial version of that software that doesn't check to see if a particular brand of hard drive is installed.) Symantec Ghost works well for this too, especially the older versions.

[Pat McCarthy]

I've attached some pictures of the login screen and what you get when you try and log in.

Before this, my dad did not need to enter a password. All that was needed was to click 'OK' to log in successfully.

[Pat McCarthy]

Thanks a bunch Tristan, your suggestion of the password reset tool worked great and fixed the problem!

Since the problem is fixed, a mod can lock or close this thread.