Password Issues in Win 2000 Professional

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael K.
  • Start date Start date
M

Michael K.

Hello:
Have a requirement to require passwords for Windows boot
and screensaver PW. Configuration is a small doctors office
with Doc having one PC and Secy the other. Both PC's are
running Windows 2000 professional. A printer is attached to
Secy PC. I set up a new user account for secy PC and turned
on PW for boot and screensaver. The old config did not
require any PW's at all. Now when I boot, new account works
fine but all previous settings are reset(desktop,
shortcuts, etc.) It accomplished what I tried to do!!!
However, I've lost file permissions to apps that were
running there. I can't go back to old way as there was no
PW requirement for Administrator ID so no password was ever
set. Also, Doc PC is unable to print via Secy PC. I would
appreciate some advice on recovery, short of rebuild.
Thanks for any help.
Michael
 
i am guessing that you used to be running without logging in at all, which
was probably running under an account that had administrator privileges.
now you have created new accounts on both machines and required them to
login, but you most likely made them as normal user accounts. you likely
have several problems.

1. you don't have the desktop settings because now you have a different user
name, each user has their own desktop so any setup you had on the old
account are not available to the new user. to fix this you might want to
copy the settings from the old account profile over to the new one, or just
reconfigure the desktop of the new account with what is really needed.
2. you can't run apps that were installed under the old account. there are
a couple reasons for this, most likely the old apps require higher
privileges than a plain user has, try making the new accounts 'power users'
and see if that lets you run the old apps. it may also be that the data for
the old apps is in folders that are owned by the old account and you don't
have access to it at all, you would have to either take ownership of it or
give the new account administrator priviledge to go get it.
3. printing doesn't work. now that you are requiring login to the machine
you will have to bypass that for the printer share to work. you should be
able to do this by adding the doc's account to the secy's printer share and
giving it permission to print. since you don't have a domain you will have
to enter the doc's use name like machinename/username.

oh, and all of this of course will require that you know the password of the
administrator account on both machines.... if you don't have that then you
have even bigger problems.
 
Dave:

Thanks for the reply.

You are correct on most things.
I only added the account on the secy PC. I did not touch
the Doc PC. The new account on the Secy PC only has default
user privileges. Any of the files and apps created on the
Secy PC were created under a default Administrator user
with all its privs.
I don't have the password for any of those power users. I
would be surprised if I were able to copy the original
desktop setting to the new user without being able to log
on as Admin or some other ID with privs.
Like you say, I have bigger problems. All the settings,
including desktop, apps, databases, printers were created
with the old userID and its privs. When I try to
look/change printer settings, they are not changeable from
that account.

Michael K.
 
did you delete the old account? and do you not know the built in
administrator account password?? have you tried the administrator account
with a blank password? there are tools out there that can go in and reset
the administrator password, they take a little bit of knowledge but if you
are down to reinstalling they are probably worth a try.
 
I did not delete any accounts. I added one account that had
no privs. I tried blank PW null, PW, anything else I could
think of.
As to tools to reset Administrator account, where can I
find the URL to download. I would hate to do a trial &
error on one inthe hope that I find one that works and wont
wipe out everything else.
Michael K.
 
the one i have used is: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
which is free and has very good instructions. there are literaly dozens of
them out there if you search google for things like "windows 2000
administrator password reset disk free download" there are only 93k hits,
lots are only free demo programs though.
 
Dave:
Thanks for your help. I have checked google for utils.
There are quite a few out there. I'll try one or two and
let you know how things go.
Michael K.
 
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