Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Resetting SA password- DAC

I have been asked a question by couple of friends and colleagues to reset or obtain the password of SA login in SQL Server.



It happens with lack of proper documentation or standards, that password of SA is forgotten. This is very big hectic if no windows user assigned to admin privileges, through which you can reset the sa password. If it’s not then earlier there were no much options and one had to move the database files to other disk and reinstall the SQL server and hell lot of stuff.. that required your time and patience.



Thanks to DAC, Dedicated Admin Connection, feature introduced in SQL Server 2008. It allows “Windows Admin User” of hosted server to start the SQL Server with single user mode (switch -m), which inherits the admin privileges to that user, through which one can reset the sa password and can grant access the administrative rights to other users.



NOTE: One should have EXTRA precautions while granting LOCAL Admin rights to any Windows login.




3 comments:

  1. I know a tool which can easily reset MS SQL Server sa password and other users password for SQL Server and Express 2000/2005/2008, no matter the password is how long and complex, just within minute, the master.mdf file used to be format.

    Maybe someone need, get it from:
    http://www.passwordunlocker.com/sql-server-password-recovery.html

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  2. Sajid Bhai,

    This information was very useful. I was actually looking out for it. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi
    Yes you are right but DCA feature is available in SQL Server 2008 versions only. So I recommend to use SQL password recovery software which performs authenticate process of password recovery. Check out from here : - http://www.en.fixsqlserver.org/freesql-server-password-recovery-tool.html

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