How to Reset Windows Server 2008 Password

[Nick]

You have just completed installing Windows Server 2008, and you hit the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key and then you were lost, What administrator password and username should I used? Especially that you did not create any during

 
 the installation process! In this article, I will show you how to successfully reset to Windows server 2008.

Windows Server 2008 is one of Microsoft Windows' server line of operating systems. Released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and officially released on February 27, 2008, it is the successor to Windows Server 2003, released nearly five years earlier. A second release, named Windows Server 2008 R2, was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009.

The solution is a two stage process. The first stage is preparation and requires the use of PING (Partimage is not ghost) which is a linux environment that can run off of a disc. You need to download the PING image and burn it to a disc before continuing.

Now that you have the disc ready, here are the steps to follow:

1. Put the disc in your server and boot off of it. The process to do this differs by server but I am sure you can figure it out (or have done it before).

2. The PING linux environment will load.

3.When the environment is fully loaded, you will receive a ">>" prompt.

4.At the ">>" prompt, type "x" and press the ENTER key. "x" will take you to a command shell rather than launching the PING user interface.

6.At the "PING login:" prompt, type in "root" and press the ENTER key.

7.At this ping you should be logged into the PING operating system. Now we need to run a few shell commands.

Run the following command: fdisk -l : grep NTFS

8.This command will list all the NTFS partitions. As best as you can, note the name of the one that contains the Windows directory.

9.Run the following command: mkdir -p /mnt/windows

10.This command creates a directory called "/mnt/windows" that will be used for mounting the windows partition

11.Run the following command: mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /mnt/windows


credit:  anny yu