Thursday, June 5, 2014

Resetting a Forgotten Domain Administrator Password

I build lots and lots of VMs (and I mean LOTS!!!)  I frequently build them and then tear them down. I also build numerous environments for testing and development etc.  I normally keep some standardized passwords and policies for my VMs so I usually do not encounter problems with being locked out of my VMs.

Unfortunately, I was playing around with an old SharePoint 2010 VM that I had built a year or so ago and while I left the machine idle, I got locked out of the VM!

Even worse, the machine had a domain controller installed on it and since I had not used the VM in a very long time, I had probably changed the password due to the password expiration policy and forgotten the new password!

Well, now I found myself unable to get into the VM and stuck with some research I had been doing on the machine that would be completely lost to me if I simply re-imaged the virtual machine.

Thankfully, I found this article to help me workaround my problem: http://www.howtogeek.com/106333/how-to-reset-your-forgotten-domain-admin-password-on-server-2008-r2/

I followed the article and it worked just like a charm!!  I was able to successfully reset my Administrator password and get back into the machine without losing any of the work I had been doing!!






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