Completely locked out of PDC. Nt 4.0 Sp6a Any suggestions?

[Wop04881]

One of my technicians disabled all accounts but the admin account on our pdc. Someone tried to log onto the administrator with wrong password and it has been locked out, or disabled for an extended period of time, it doesn't look like it's going to unlock itself. There are no trusts setup on this machine with the other domains. Thank god all the services are running correctly, however i'm unable to log onto the machine at all. Any suggestions, minus the expensive ones (unless someone knows where i can get a version erd commander that fell off the back of a truck.)
Any help/advice is greatly appreciated.
Happy New Year,
Wop
wop04881@hotmail.com

 

[lawrence54321]

There is only one sugestion sack the person in question and tell him to get a job in a sweet shop, he should not be left alone with anything IT related

 

[lifto]

I don't have an NT4 PDC here but I'm wondering (and you may have tried this) about trying to log onto the machine (locally) rather that using the domain log on.

HTH

 

[JohnCitron]

Hi,

I agree with Lawrence - sack the sob because he does not have the brains to work in an IT environment. %-(

Anyway...

If you can't login locally either try this utility:

NTFSBOOT.EXE

It builds a bootable disk that runs a bit of Linux, and allows one to boot up and change passwords from a command line. I've used it and can say it is effective the four out of the six times I've used it.

I have one concern though if you change the Administrator password, will it effect any services or applications that maybe running on the PDC?

 

[age]

I've used this method:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

and it worked great .... it is the linus boot floppy method, but this site gives very good instructions...

good luck!

 

[JohnCitron]

Age,

Thanks for the link... I copied to my favorites for future referefence.

John

 

[age]

no probs... ..

In answer to some of the other posts here... I don't think it is possible to log on 'locally' to a PDC... The domain Administrator account is effectively the local admin account for that machine....

And as for any services that might be using the admin password, if you use this linux floppy to change the admin account password, you can always either then change the password back to what it was originally (if you know what it is!), or, just use the Services control panel applet to change the password on any services using the administrator account, and then stop and restart them ...

once again, good luck!

 

[Wop04881]

This is how I resolved the issue. I noticed that the exchange service was running correctly. Therefore the exchange user wasn't locked out. I couldn't remember what I set the password to though. So I booted to the linux floppy and changed the password. Logged into the machine, reenabled all the necessary accounts, set the local policy to unlock duration of 30mins (instead of never) and downgraded the tech to simple dialup/email help tickets. That linux boot disk works great, i've used it 5 or 6 times and only had 1 machine not recover from it, that was luckily only a workstation. I also created an erd disk just in case something like that happens again.
Thanks for everyones help