My father set up an admin account on his XP pro machine with a 24 character password.
When you boot the machine, there is only room for 11 characters, so… no go. He can only log in as a guest, and now can’t load any software.
Any ideas?
I’m writing this from my brothers XP home machine. So I don’t have access right now to my dads XP pro at the moment. Or a pro environment. Tomorrow, I will be driving 100 miles back home. My dad has gone to bed, but I may be able to help him in the morning.
Anyway
There is a way to set the XP look back to a 2000 look, but I can’t seem to find it. I thought that perhaps, the old 2000 look might allow you to enter the 24 characters. But I don’t know.
That would be the perfect fix. Then he can set a reasonable password (not that he needs one anyway)
The machine is only a few months old. It did not come with the XP OME disk. But I’m pretty sure it must be on his machine. Ehh…… I spent about 20 minutes looking for it, but did not turn it up. Where should he/I look.
He has partitioned his disk already, so I suppose if we could find the XP directory, we could do a re-install on C: and he won’t loose all his stuff.
Just to be clear. Some how, according to my Dad, he set up the Admin password with 24 charactors in it :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :smack: . On login, there is only room for 11.
Not sure if it would be possible to set a password that long, but Dad seems to think it took (seems like that would be an incredible dis-connect on the op system)
But, now on log on, there is not room for the entire password.
Tough one:
What Brand is the PC?
How did he Partition the HardDrive?
In Theory he could enter a 24 character Password.
Is it safe to assume their is no other Admin Profile he Knows of?
Did he Enter a Hint for the Password?
Did he try to keep typing the password even though it had already filled up the password Entry box. It is very possible that you can enter the 24 character password but it looks like you cannot.
I will test with an Admin User set up with a password of test12345678901234567890.
I will post back shortly.
Try downloading the simple floppy boot disk image from the following site. It essentially launches a simple OS shell before Windows loads, then prompts you to point it to the location of the Windows installation. From there, you tell it which account you want to reset the password on, and it will wipe it out. I’ve used it at work a dozen times or so when people have forgotten their passwords.
For kicks I just created a test user and made the password the entire alphabet (a -> z). When setting up the account the password space is big enough to take it.
When logging in there was only room for 11 (or whatever) characters but I typed in the alphabet and it worked fine and let me in.
Good News. The Sign on Screen does accept a 24 character password.
Tell your Dad to try it again and just keep typing when it looks like he has run out of room.
Not sure. He got it through global something or other.
He uses Partition Magic. I think. He has about 6 drives set up at this point.
Yes. I looked under the user accounts and there is the Admin account and him. He set himself up as an administrator. So, on logon, it asks for his password, and it only has room for the 11 chars.
My Dad is a retired fellow, that reads a bit too much into security issues and such.
Upon review, while I was writing ----
I will try some of your suggestions. I think he has tried to type in the whole password, but I will try again in the morning.
I don’t think he forgot his 24 character password. It makes some sense the way he built it. But that is certainly a possibility.
And then look at that download that giant rat suggested.
The password field definitely accepts more than 11 characters; you just can’t see the rest because the new dots that appear look just like the dots that were already there.
In other words, *********** becomes ************ but the entire field scrolls over by one * and you don’t see the difference.
If all else fails, push CTRL-ALT-DEL twice at the login screen (no, this isn’t one of those jokes that’ll restart your computer :)). Login as “Administrator” with a blank password; this is a default admin account that might still be there unless someone or something disabled it.
IIRC the maximum password length in XP is 127 characters. Sounds like he’s just forgotten the password. There are a number of tools available for free on the internet to reset the Administrator password on an XP box.
