Renamed 'Administrator' account, can't logon anymore

[David]

Hello all,

Here's the scenario: I had the 'Administrator' account renamed to 'Dave' for the longest while, and I installed Dekart Logon and generated a key based on that and put it on a USB stick. Now I changed the 'Dave' account name back to 'Administrator', and as you suspect Dekart won't let me logon to the workstation anymore. Furthermore, when I boot XP up and reach the logon screen, Dekart does _not_ allow me to manually enter an alternate username/password combo, the boxes are grayed out.

I have the recovery console installed, it seems I can't rename the Administrator account back to 'Dave' through that. Furthermore I can't use safe mode on my box for some reason. What options do I have?

Thanks.

[Alex Railean]

That's an unpleasant situation indeed, but everything is 'normal behaviour', except the part with the impossibility to boot to safe mode.

The key contains your credentials, a tuple of the form (username, password), these credentials are passed to the operating system.

The username on the key is - Administrator; after you've renamed the account on Windows, all the attempts to log on with (Administrator, password) will evidently be rejected, since such a name does not exist.

You can fix this by updating the contents of the key; see the attached screenshot. You need to install the key management tool (http://www.dekart.com/products/card_management/key_manager/) on another computer, explore your key and modify it. Afterwards you can use it on the computer which is currently locked. Key Manager has a trial period, so you'll have plenty of time to experiment with it, and there will be no need to actually buy the program.


Dekart does _not_ allow me to manually enter an alternate username/password combo, the boxes are grayed out.
It seems that you have enabled "logon only with key".


As for safe mode, are there any error messages? Or anything else that might give us a clue? Just in case, make sure you don't use "Safe mode with networking" (because in that case Dekart Logon's modules are loaded and they are active).


Let me know how things went.

[Unregistered]

Thank you for your response Alex.

Unpleasant indeed, but gladly I've managed to fix the situation. I simply installed the Dekart trial on another PC, and added a tuple to the key containing the new Administrator/password combo, and that worked just fine. The thought came to me a few minutes after posting, I wasn't aware of the key management tool which looks interesting. As for the safe mode issue, it looks like it may have been a virus.

Everything seems fixed now (I hope), thanks again for the input!


That's an unpleasant situation indeed, but everything is 'normal behaviour', except the part with the impossibility to boot to safe mode.

The key contains your credentials, a tuple of the form (username, password), these credentials are passed to the operating system.

The username on the key is - Administrator; after you've renamed the account on Windows, all the attempts to log on with (Administrator, password) will evidently be rejected, since such a name does not exist.

You can fix this by updating the contents of the key; see the attached screenshot. You need to install the key management tool (http://www.dekart.com/products/card_management/key_manager/) on another computer, explore your key and modify it. Afterwards you can use it on the computer which is currently locked. Key Manager has a trial period, so you'll have plenty of time to experiment with it, and there will be no need to actually buy the program.



It seems that you have enabled "logon only with key".


As for safe mode, are there any error messages? Or anything else that might give us a clue? Just in case, make sure you don't use "Safe mode with networking" (because in that case Dekart Logon's modules are loaded and they are active).


Let me know how things went.