Your hard disk may have crashed.  You have decided you need data recovery for all your important files. For this you will need the administrator password. Most computers have only one administrator account and that means you cannot log in using another account. There are many ways to reset the administrator password of your PC. One thing you can try is installing the hard drive as a slave into another computer. This will let you gain access in some cases. Another thing you can do is install a second copy of the operating system in your computer. This may let you gain access. The problem with these methods is that they are not easy and time-consuming. Following are some easy methods you can use to rest the administrator password of your PC.

• You can try to restore your PC to a backed up System State (in Windows 2000/XP/2003) or an ERD (in NT 4.0). Something which you do know the password of. The trouble with this approach is that, your recently added groups and users will probably be lost. You will also lose all the changed passwords of your user accounts since the time you did your last back up.

• Or you can go online for help. The administrator password can be decrypted. This will allow you to show the original password and you may not even change it. For this, go to http://www.loginrecovery.com and follow the instructions. They will ask you to download a program on another computer. You will need an internet connection for this. The program will extract the password. After that the encrypted password has to be submitted to the site. Then they will recover the lost password for you. The great thing about this site is that you will not lose your EFS encrypted files because the administrator password remains unchanged!

• One of the best online administrator password resetting sites today is the

  http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/. Visit the site and follow the instructions. The major reason for its popularity is that it is free. But even when you forget that, this program is by far the easiest to use. What this site’s program does is that, it modifies the encrypted password, thus allowing you to gain access of your administrator account. You can set a new password here and you don’t need to know your old one to do that. A great feature of this site is that it will help you unlock locked or disabled user accounts. The program offers support to Vista users too.

There are other ways by which you can reset the administrator password of your PC but the above few are the easiest and highly recommended.