As Microsoft’s other products, MS SQL Server is easy to operate, and also has good speed and stability, thus becomes the first choice for database development in Windows platform. If you forgot SA password,  how to login to SQL Server? Find the old password or reset SA password to a new one?

SQL SERVER offers two login mechanisms: windows account login and database user login. The former login is to log on with windows system Administrator account, the latter is to log on with user account set up in the SQL Server – the typical one is SA account.

If you can log on to the server by windows admin account, it is not difficult to solve the problem.

• 1. Login into SQL server using Windows Authentication.
• 2. In Object Explorer, open Security folder, open Logins folder. Right Click on SA account and go to Properties.
• 3. Reset SA password, and confirm it. Click OK to finish.
• 4. After restarting SQL Server and all its services, you can log into SQL Server by SA login with new SQL SA password.

If you cannot go through the above steps, try following ways.

Method 1

MS SQL Server Password Unlcoker grantees 100% successful SA password reset for MS SQL Server 2008/2005/2000 in seconds. You only need to have master.mdf file of the server.

1. Download MS SQL Server Password Unlocker on your local PC, install and launch it.

2. Click the Open button to import the file of master.mdf.

3.Select the SA account and then click Change Password button.

4. Enter your new password and click OK.

5. Login to SQL Server to see if you have reset SA password.

Method 2

If you have no system administrator privileges, as long as can get two files like *.mdf (data file) and *.ldf of the database (log file), you can also access to SQL Server through below operations.

Assume that the data file and the log file are sy. mdf and sy. ldf, copy them in d: \. (Please stop SQL Server service at first and then copy the files.) And the database name is “newsy”.

First, install a new SQL Server on your computer, log on to open Query Analyzer, and then enter the SQL statement: sp_attach_db ‘newsy’,'d:\sy.mdf’,'d:\sy.ldf’

Then press F5 key, if the system prompts “command completed successfully”. Congratulations, you get the full control of that database.

Compared with method 1, method 2 is hard and complicated, a tool works to reset SA password is more time-saving. You can download trial version of MS SQL Server Password Unlcoker for evaluation.