Recovering admin password in Vista

[james.wired]

I am trying to help a co-worker recover the administrator password on their Vista machine. There are currently two accounts on the OS (admin and another without admin privileges). To begin with, they had forgotten the password to both. I searched the forums and came across a thread with the mention of Ophcrack in it. I tried this method and was able to retrieve only the password for the account that did not have admin rights, the other account's password was "not found" as it read in Ophcrack, I tried it again 3 more times but it came with the same results. Would the fact that it's a Vista Spanish version have anything to do with it not being able to come up with the other password? The recovered one was in English.

Not sure what to do from here, I've searched these forums and Googled but can't come up with much. Any help would be much appreciated!

edit: I did come across something about creating an additional Administrator account on the computer but I didn't really trust the article and it was kind of sketchy.

 

[carnageX]

Not sure if it will work on the account that doesn't have Admin privileges...but you could try activating the hidden Admin account via the command prompt.

Run command prompt as admin and enter the following:
net user administrator /active:yes

 

[james.wired]

I can't run anything as admin, it prompts for a password to continue. Thanks though!

Just used this tool and it worked like a breeze. I definitely suggest having this around if you don't already:

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

edit: double post my bad...

 

[carnageX]

Merged the posts.

And nice find, will have to remember that one.