Johnny Helpdesk

At some point, just about every IT professional has run into the task of recovering or resetting a password for a user on an operating system. Even many home users have run into this issue. It happens--people forget passwords!

The forgotten password can be for a regular user or administrator; on a standard file system, or an NTFS Encrypting File System. The question then becomes, "What do I do?"

Fortunately, there are a number of mechanisms available to deal with the lost password scenario, both in terms of proactive measures as well as disaster recovery tools and techniques.

If we assume that a user has not undertaken any proactive password recovery measures in advance, then we can immediately look at our disaster recovery options. In this case, we want to examine our options for account access and/or data recovery.