Reset Domain Admin Password

I had to change my admin password on my development domain recently... Then promptly forgot it. How do you over come this? I thought that I would have to reinstall Windows on my DC, and redo all of my domain work. Turns out there is a hack.

First to make this solution work you need to have a local account that has admin rights to the OS. This can be the built in Administrator user that is created on install, but if you are like most people that account has been disabled. If you have no local accounts active with admin access, you are screwed. Go find some third party hackerware that will hack your domain and leave your vulnerable to any attack the hackerware wants to put on.

Anyway I always create an account that is a local admin on my servers for various reasons. This account is not named administrator and is set up according to best practices. So what do?

First you need to get out your Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD. You boot to this disk and select the repair option.
You are then given several options. You want to click on the Command Prompt option.

Things get slightly tricky here, because it is ambiguous what your drives are called. On a physical server, the C drive is most likely C, but if you are dealing with a HyperV or a VMWare server, C just might not be C. You need to find your OS dive and navigate to your Windows\System32 directory.

Here you will need to do some trickery. You need to be able to get to the command prompt from the log in screen when you get back to normal mode. So we have to do some fun stuff in order to get this to happen. So... When you look at your log on screen what do you have to work with? You have the two text boxes, the switch user button, the submit button, and (ta da!!) the Ease of Access button. We need to rename the command prompt application to the Ease of Access application, so that when we press the Ease of Access button on the log in screen the command prompt opens.

So from your command prompt in the recovery console rename the utilman.exe to utilman.exe.bak and then rename cmd.exe to utilman.exe. Reboot

When you get to the log on screen, simply click on the Ease of Access button. That will launch the command prompt. From the prompt type "user administrator NewPass123" That's it! Log in now with your new password.