Lazesoft Recovery Suite is an easy-to-use all-in-one recovery toolkit to repair crashed Windows, recover data from deleted, formatted, or damaged partitions, clone or back up disks, and reset forgotten Windows passwords.

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Windows 2003 password recovery

If you have forgotten your Windows Server 2003 administrator, you do not need to worry. With our Lazesoft Recover My Password Server Edition you can easily and quickly reset both local and domain user administrator passwords without data lose.

Before explaining the steps how to recover Windows Server 2003 administrator password. Let me introduct some basics of Windows Server 2003 user account.

If Windows Server 2003 is an Active Directory Domain Controller, the Windows installation has both domain user accounts and local user accounts. Default Windows 2003 SBS version is a Active Directory Domain Controller.

If Windows Server 2003 is not an Active Directory Domain Controller, the Windows installation has only local user accounts.

Microsoft uses different encryption algorithms to protected these two kinds of Windows Server user account passwords and save them on different places.

Domain user accounts - A domain user account is one whose username and password are stored on a domain controller instead of the computer the user is logging into. As it's known to us, the domain user accounts are saved in Active Directory database file (ntds.dit).

Local user accounts - In Windows, a local user account is one whose username and encrypted password are stored on the computer itself. When you log in as a local user, the computer checks its own list of users and its own password file to see if you are allowed to log into the computer. The local user accounts are stored in Windows SAM registry hive.

If your Windows Server 2003 is an Active Directory Domain Controller, please refer to the following tip: Forgot Windows 2003 Domain Administrator Password.

Prepare a Lazesoft Recover My Password CD and boot your Windows Server computer from it.

Then Lazesoft Recover My Password Server Edition will start automatically starts. And then take the following steps:

Select the Windows 2003 installation volume.

Select a user account for which you want to recover password.

Click the <Reset/Unlock> button to reset its password.

Reset account password, unlock user account.

Click <Finish> to end Lazesoft Recover My Password, then system will automatically reboot.

Remove the CD from your computer, reboot the computer from hard disk.

Now you are able to get back into your Windows Server 2003.

Lazesoft Recovery Suite is easy to use, powerful boot disk design to Recover Data, Recover crashed Windows System, Recover Windows Password, Clone or Backup Disk, etc.

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