Hello TZ community,

I would like to start off by saying that this has been quite the trying experience and yes I know I am stupid/careless/lacking common tech sense on more than one level, but here it is: I am running Win XP Pro on a self-built pc and I have one admin account and yes I forgot the password.

I was going out of town set a password so my hooligan brother wouldn't do anything to it and when I came back I forgot some character or number that I appended last minute.

I have scoured the internet and here are my more specific problems.

>First of all I attempted to log into safe mode and use the that Admin account to use the net user command, but for some reason the generic safe mode Admin account has a password- I don't know why and have absolutely no clue as to what it might be. What is the default for XP Pro?

>I have tried booting from various other OS's to no avail (95, 98, XP home, Linux).

>I have attempted to use password reset utilities (suggested on the petri.co article including the lostpassword.com demo). It refuses to boot from disk. The boot order in bios does the disc drive first- I don't understand why these utilities are not working. I even had to use my XP Pro CD to help make a windows key image for one of the bootables. As a result I am even less inclined to try buying a password reset/recovery prgrm.

>I have attempted removing the harddrive and putting it into another computer and accessing it that way: this gets me the closest. I can access my prgrms and everything but I cannot get to my documents, music, and pictures- all of which are important- school docs, music I paid for, and pics of a family vacation overseas. The admin profile is now a folder which I cannot access- I have tried taking ownership by logging on to the computer with the other harddrive's admin account but when I right click and select properties there is no security tab on the "access-denied" folder.

>Local computer store Service depts are less than useless.

As you can see I am not posting a problem w/o having tried a teensy bit of research and a tad bit of actual work. I would GREATLY appreciate any help/suggestions on this. I feel that the two avenues most worth trying are figuring out the password for the safemode admin acct and figuring out how to access the profile as a locked up folder.


Thank you from a new struggling and rather exhausted member,

pearl03