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Having too much systems to work on has one small disadvantage – there’s a hell of a lot of Administrator and root passwords to remember. And yesterday happend what was meant to happen for some time  - I forgot an Administator password for one of my Windows 2003 Servers. For obvious security reasons (I had no pencil on my desk) I haven’t noted password to this machine anywhere.

The server is running on my company VMware ESX server and I decided to hack into it. VMware Infrastructure Client has great ability – it let’s you share your local CD (or .iso image) to the server. I don’t need to say more, do I? Yes, it is so simple.

So, here’s a step by step tutorial how to reset Administrator’s password on Windows 2003 server running on ESX. Prerequisites:

- VMware Infrastucture Client

- Permission from system’s administrator (don’t be naughty!)

- Live CD with your prefered password tools (I took http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ 3MB only!)

Disclaimer: The procedure below can destroy data on your server, use on your own risk! I don’t take any responsibility of the damages you may cause trying to runt the procedure (or any of its parts).

1. Stop the server. I had to shut down VM image, not good for file system, but I had no choice.

2. Edit preferences of your image to enable remote CD drive:

3. Change boot options to set boot delay

My image has been set to boot from Hard Drive first. I had to go into bios settings to set boot order. I’ve also set 10s delay on booting to give myself time to connect CD image – on power on it’s unconnected.

4. Power on machine and set up boot order

5. Connect iso image. Quickly, before system start booting

6. See system booting from CD, use your the tool to reset Administrator password.

7. Enjoy!

Hint:

It was impossible on my machine to set new Administrator password using ntpasswd. I had to use option to blank the password.