Went to work this morning to find out there was a power shortage the night before. This led to the computers rebooting, and one of them rebooted and was locked out because we didn’t seem to have a password for it.

Heh, me being the usual computer genius around the area.. ahem, heh.. dug out a password cracker for NT based machines and burnt it onto a mini CD. So I plopped the disc in but nothing happened in bootup. Tried it again only to notice that the lousy CDROM drive wasn’t connected to the PC (the power cable was, but not the IDE cable). So back to square 1, I dug out another password cracker over the Internet. This one was a floppy based boot disk. Woot! Dug out a box of diskettes I bought five years ago and removed the plastic wrapping (yes, that’s how much I think of floppies to use it). Copied the contents over to the disc and whacked it into the rebellious computer.

To cut a long story short, I got the list of users for the computer. I didn’t reset or crack any passwords, but found a user account that didn’t need a password. So I just rebooted the PC and logged on as the other user (the weird computer started up and had a different username typed into the input box). So here was a simple problem fixed.

The irony of this post was that I’ve always advocated that I would not put a floppy drive in my next PC. Heh, and now, here it is I use a floppy to save the computer that acts as the hub that connects and shares all the printers. Sweet.

Okie. Need to gulp down my lunch and get back to work.