Windows7How

Recover Administrator Password in Win 7 – Part II

March 9, 2010

In the first part of this procedure document, you found your Windows 7 DVD, rebooted your PC into the Windows 7 install and chose to “Repair your computer”. You should have already brought up the System Restore wizard and began the process. If you have not made it this far, please go back to Part I and follow each and every step written out for you there. Now, we will continue the process of recovering your lost Administrator password. Again, do not forget that this will only work if you remember a previous Administrator password and use System Restore to create restore points on a regular basis.

The System Restore window is just in front of you now and you should have already clicked on Next to get past the informational dialog at the beginning of this process. Now you should see a list of all of your System Restore points which you have dutifully produced, right?

Select the restore point which was created before you changed your Administrator password – this should be a password you remember – so that you lose the smallest amount of system information; if you were to choose an older point, who knows what applications will not be there which you have installed since that restore point was saved. Make your selection and then click Next.

The System Restore window will now display the drive you wish to restore. In the selection window, you will see an entry for the drives on your system. Notice that the bootable DVD is now assigned drive letter X; this is a default setting when you boot and is only a virtual drive based on the Windows 7 DVD – you can just ignore that one for now. You will see your drive plus the Windows 7 DVD drive and any other drives you have assigned letters (if you have one partition on one drive, there will be two selections, yours + drive X; if you have three drives setup, you will see four, and so on). Your system drive (where Windows is installed) will be selected by System Restore by default. Click Next.

You will now be prompted to start the restore operation. There will be a window with the date and time and a warning that not all drives were chosen for the restore operation and so will be left out. This only means your Windows 7 DVD, the X drive. (Perhaps, Microsoft should fix this tiny issue at some point?) You will be presented with a Finish button and the standard Back and Cancel buttons as well. Click on Finish and another confirmation dialog box will appear. It is a standard warning informing you that System Restore cannot be interrupted and the process is irreversible. Click Yes on this box. The restore operation has begun and you will see a System Restore progress indicator window. It will be a while, so grab yourself some tea or something and sit back and wait.

Another waiting period is coming after the System Restore process is complete. In front of you will be a dialog box informing you that the system must now be restarted. Simply click on the Restart button. After you do this, it may take some time to complete this operation as well, so finish off that tea and relax for a few moments.

Here it comes – your chance to get to that Administrator account and get command of your operating system back again. You will see the standard Windows security window asking you to login to the system. Log in using any user account. Once the system is up and running, head on over to User Accounts (inside Control Panel) and get to Manage Accounts. You will, of course, be presented with the User Account Control (UAC) asking you to provide an Administrator password to access the accounts. This is where you can use your old Administrator password. Now that you are at Manage Accounts, simply get in and change the Administrator password to whichever new password you choose. Write it down!

That is the process to gaining access to your lost Administrator password provided you have an old Administrator password in your possession. Now that you have restored your system, it will probably be time to go back and install any software you need to and make any changes to your Windows 7 settings. You are done and life is back to normal; well, as normal as it ever was.

If you have completely lost your Administrator password, there are other options to recover it, so keep searching and you will find out what needs to be done. Failing that, the only other option is to re-install Windows 7.

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Tags: administrator, bootable DVD, password, password recovery, recovery point, reinstall windows 7, repair your pc, restore point, system restore, uac, win 7, windows 7, windows 7 dvd, windows 7 setting