Vista Upgrade: No Admin Password

J

jameslaur

New Member
Hey guys, I just upgraded to Vista from XP. It appears that I should have setup a admin password prior to upgrade. Can you advise any options on how to get it?

If I need to remove Vista, can you tell me how I can do that and revert back to XP safetly? At this point I am ok with not keeping the info on my old PC. Thanks for the help.

Jameslaur
 

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jameslaur said:
Hey guys, I just upgraded to Vista from XP. It appears that I should have setup a admin password prior to upgrade. Can you advise any options on how to get it?

If I need to remove Vista, can you tell me how I can do that and revert back to XP safetly? At this point I am ok with not keeping the info on my old PC. Thanks for the help.

Jameslaur
Click to expand...

There is no way to "Uninstall" Vista after upgrading from XP. You would need to format the drive and install XP fresh in order to remove Vista.

Which Admin password are you referring to? The one to the Administrator account? Or to the one that pops up in your user account whenever you perform a task that requires admin credentials? By default, AUC just asks "Continue" or "Cancel". The password prompt is only available on limited user accounts, which are created as such only if you tell it to.
 

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Thanks for the reply. The one to the Administration account. It was the only one that I had on XP and I apparently never actually setup a password. I can only use the 'guest' account now since I don't know what the admin pass is. Continue or cancel isn't working for me. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.
 

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jameslaur said:
Thanks for the reply. The one to the Administration account. It was the only one that I had on XP and I apparently never actually setup a password. I can only use the 'guest' account now since I don't know what the admin pass is. Continue or cancel isn't working for me. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.
Click to expand...

On Vista, the account named "Administrator" is disabled by default, and all new user accounts have less privledges than Administrators, but more than Limited accounts.

Chances are, this little hickup of yours came in because you upgraded your XP installation as opposed to a clean install of Vista.

I'm not too sure if this will work or not, but try booting into Safe Mode. If you can log-in to the Adminstrator account, go into control panel and create a new user account. Reboot normally, and you should be able to log-in using the newly created account.
 

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jameslaur said:
Thanks for the reply. The one to the Administration account. It was the only one that I had on XP and I apparently never actually setup a password. I can only use the 'guest' account now since I don't know what the admin pass is. Continue or cancel isn't working for me. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Hi Jameslaur,

You might try one of these methods to see if you can gain access to the account. In your case, try Method Two first. If all else fails, create a new Administrator account and delete the old one after transfering anything you want to keep.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/102005-reset-user-account-password.html

Shawn
 

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I believe the issue i had was the same as posted here. I was an admin before upgrading and after the upgrade i was a a standard user, without the option to make myself an admin. Since I could not find a resolution to this and i ended up here when searching I am assuming someone might come across this thread for a solution. What I did was go to the Local Security Policy in Admin tools. Under the Security Options, near the bottom there is an entry for: Run all Administrators in Admin approval mode and set this to disabled. restarted and viola I am back to being an administrator. There a re a lot of settings here to tweak if you are looking to ease up on the crazy security that comes defaulted
 

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