A friend came by the other day and dropped off a computer he found cleaning out his old house. It's a windows 2000 professional and it looks like it works fine but it asks me for a username and password. He said the computer's been there before he moved into that house so he wouldn't know how to start it. Is there anyway i can do about this?

I hate these situations, there are those that appear to be able to sort these thongs easily, but TBH I've rarely managed to do it, the 1st question though is can you access ANY admin account ?
If you can life becomes much easier, if not it's time to go fishing lol, the 1st trick I would try is a reset on the CMOS, pull the mains lead from the system (shutting down first obviously), pop the battery and move the jumper to the clear position for a minute or so, then put it all back and fire it up, we may get lucky, and this is the least complicated way.

After that it gets more involved, and I'll want to do some research first as it's been a while, I know I've got lucky in the past with a CMOS reset, but it was more luck than chance, but are you in a position to slave this drive in another system at all ?
Just wondering if we can find anything out that way, maybe using Control Userpasswords2, otherwise we will need to use a specific tool for this.

One last thought though, what accounts show as being available for logging into ?
I'm wondering if we may be able to gain access via this way, also is there an admin account showing called admin ?
I'm wondering if we can log into that account rather than the users account, if it's not showing as an option type it into the login box and leave the password blank, if that fails try admin as a pass, the user name may be Admin or Administrator, try both, see if any of this helps.

what do you mean by...

On the motherboard, there should be a little battery, the CMOS battery, looking like a silver coin. Gently pop it out, and nearby there should be a set of jumpers, normally pin 1 or 2. Move those to either pin 2 (in case 1 is default) or 3 (in case that 2 is default) Wait a few seconds (5-10 seconds) and set jumper back to default. Now CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) should be cleared. Re-insert battery. This might also be a good time to replace it, since it is a old PC

Do remember to unplug the entire PC from the wall socket before rumaging around the insides.

Cheers

Sorry I thought from your status that you were more aware of things like doing a CMOS reset, so I only covered it basically, Thanks to Abydos for explaining this for them.

Also when you do this your settings will be changed, I just want to check you are able to get help if the changes stop you from using the PC, given you didn't know about the CMOS reset my guess is if your hard drives are not standard the boot order may be changed in the bios and cause the system to not see them, it's an easy fix, I just want to make sure your able to get help if needed getting the settings back to what is required.

oh yeah no problem and i've found the CMOS battery(thing took FOREVER to find too) but i don't see any jumpers...well to be honest i don't know what they are but i don't see anything that looks like a "pin 1 or 2"

Here is a picture of a jumper. In the picture, the jumper itself (the blue thingy) would have to be moved to cover the 3rd pin, exposing pin 1. Hope that makes sense

LOL @ Abydos, yeah it can be really hard to explain something like this can't it

To aid the above, here is a basic demo of what to do, applying logic to what you see and following the above it should make sense, but don't take any notice of the pins I suggest here, just the principle of covering them.

To start the code I will use is x = a covered pin, o = is a a free pin with nothing on.
xxo = what you will first see, 2 pins will be covered and 1 will be free.
oxx = remove the jumper from the 2 pins it is covering, then move it over to cover the pin that was free, eg pins 1 & 2 were covered to begin with, then move it to cover pins 2 & 3, so 2 pins are covered at all times.
xxo = return the jumper to covering the way it was when you first saw it, failure to do this will stop the system from booting.

I hope with the great help above this completes the picture for you to achieve doing this.

Hehe, yea, tech stuff can be fun
But with team-effort we get there.
Great explanation btw.


Cheers

I'm sorry. This is a little embarrasing, but i'm gonna go off topic for a bit. How do you put images up like that? There's something I wanna show y'all about the PC but have no clue on how to get the pic up

haha oops sorry. I guess I figured it out on that last post after all, but yeah the pic above is a pic i took of the CMOS battery(or i think that's what it is) well yeah i've been looking and i still can't seem to find the jumper anywhere

Can you tell us the make\model of the motherboard ?
Also watch out if there is a revision number on it as well, because this can make a difference, you will find the details printed on the motherboard, but some are hard to see, often they are printed by the pci slots for the cards, other times it can be up near the ram, but if you can let us know this info we can get the manual and tell you where it is.

If I can intercede just for a moment...

If the computer is asking for a username and password, then you mean Windows 2000 is booting up and the login screen is appearing.

No matter how you do it, resetting the CMOS settings IS NOT going to remove the password in Windows. There is just no other way to slice that one.

To the OP, when the username and password window comes up, type in administrator for the username and leave the password blank. See if that gets you on.

If you still can't get on, you'll have to search the internet through the large amount of information available to assist you in bypassing the password on your computer. At WhatTheTech we do not support password cracking or bypassing, so you'll have to use the information already available on the internet to achieve what you need. This is a simple policy based on the fact that we cannot prove ownership of any computer and do not want to put ourselves in any position to assist in someone "breaking the law."

This post has been edited by appleoddity: Jun 17 2009, 03:29 PM

Yeah I know it's unlikely that a CMOS reset would remove the pass, but it's quick and simple to do and I have had 1 system in the past with a password issue that this cleared, otherwise it's as you say you need that tool(s), but I have not had much luck with it personally, usually because by the time I get the system it's so messed up i don't have a hope lol.

Thanks a lot for the advice and all... but it seems now the monitor doesn't want to turn on now:smack: . well truth be told i don't think the monitor is to blame here because I tried plugging in this monitor (from the PC I'm currently using right now) and it still didn't want to work. The light on the monitor stays at orange instead of green(but it does say that the signal is lost when i unplug the monitor from the tower so I'm guessing it can still read it, but nothing comes on) I'm so confused