I've seen where you can give these rights to system recovery when you can get into windows and pre-install system recovery. But I was wondering about when you can't get into windows to do that. What if you don't know the account or password on the system but need to use system restore?

Make a password reset disk. You can do this by going to user accounts in control panel, or running this command:

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll,PRShowSaveWizardExW

-gosh

We use this ISO all the time to reset/blank the local admin password

http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

but i will point out 2 things, the first of which is on that page

If used on users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or Vista, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless you remember the old password again

and #2 if you change the password of a non admin account, it will ask if you want to add that user to the administrators group -dont do it itll corrupt the account everytime weve tried it

Oh i forgot to add, goshs way is probably the best way to go if possible. I just chipped in my 2 cents in case that doesnt work

Thanks guys.

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll,PRShowSaveWizardExW

will that work in dos?

I will prolly go the iso route. Thanks for the help.

Just run it from a run box

The nice thing about a password reset disk is it copies your encryption key to the password reset disk. So if you use a password reset disk you won't lose access to encrypted documents. The way encryption works in XP is in your profile is an encryption key that includes a random hash along with your current password. therefore if you use a 3rd party program to reset your password, you won't be able to decrypt previously encrypted files because the key will be wrong, although you of course can encrypt new files.

One thing that was talked about when xp was launched was forcing users to create a password reset disk because it's such a good idea. But apparently that idea lost traction inside microsoft...

-gosh