This tip was submitted to the searchWin2000 Tip Exchange by member Stanford Morison. Let other users know how useful it is by rating the tip below.

Have you forgotten the administrator password, and no other user accounts exist to log in to your Win2000 computer with an NTFS file system? Follow these steps to create a new admin account.

1. Take out the hard drive with the NTFS file system from the computer, and put it into a PC (with Win2000 and NTFS too) as a slave.
2. Back up the files on the slave on the master hard drive, then erase the SAM file of the slave hard drive.
3. Put the hard drive back as master on the computer where you took it out.
4. Start the computer, and you now have a new administrator account with a blank password.