Category Archives: Windows Servers

Anything related to Windows servers

Windows XP Lost or Forgotten password

You would think that doing something to recover a password or clear a password would be simple. Reading through all the various offerings and comments accross the web it appears that it is not simple and certainly not cheap!

This open source linux based solution manages to combine free and easy.

PC Login Now is available from SourceForge

It’s an iso CD image that you burn to a CD.  Boot the offending computer with this CD and it loads a Linux shell with the PC Login Now application.

Select the operating system that you want to access – generally you will have only one – and click on Next. Select the user that you want to access and check the Password is Empty (i.e. blank) option box and click on Next. You can then select another user or reboot the computer.

Under Windows XP (although I expect this on other Windows versions as well) you will get a prompt to scan your hard disk. I am sure this is a side effect of making the back end system change and not an issue. Let the scan run and then access your Windows system using the local user account with a blank password.

Files not found after Windows 2003 server patch updates

I patched a Windows 2003 server this morning and on reboot I got these errors as I logged on.

The messages consisted of 4 sequential file not found reports all in this format.

"Windows cannot find 'C:WindowsSystem32urlm'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search."
"Windows cannot find 'C:WindowsSystem32urlm'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search."

View full size error message

The files reported, in order, were:
C:WindowsSystem32winnin
C:WindowsSystem32urlm
C:WindowsSystem32brow
C:WindowsSystem32webc

I then found that IE8 was still outstanding as an update and installed that and rebooted and these messages did not appear.

I am thinking that Windows 2003 type servers might all require IE8 to support the current round of patches.

It’s a bit odd and I have not seen a repeat on any other server in the same situation but I figured it was worth noting.

Turn off UAC on windows server 2008

The UAC appears to give me grief constantly, it seems like every error I get with installing software stems from permissions issue.

So I went to turn off the UAC today on a server just to confirm if it made a difference.
To turn it off:

  • go to Administrative Tools -> System Configuration -> Tools tab
  • scroll down to Disable UAC and click to select
  • then click Launch and note that it will require a reboot of the server

Apparently it does not turn it off fully, as I still needed to use Run as Administrator despite my logged in account being specifically added to the local computer administrators. Seems odd and it did not fix the specific error I was looking at, so I turned it back on.