Joomla · Joomla Errors

Joomla 1.5 Help- Reset Administrator Password

A very common question is how to reset your Joomla administrator password. Either you haven’t used your Joomla site for a while, your Joomla site was hacked and the password changed, or perhaps the administrator left and didn’t leave you with the Joomla administrator password.

You already tried to reset your administrator password in the front end and did not work or have access. You also tried to use the forget password tool and no password was sent. So my advice would be to use phpMyAdmin to reset your Joomla Administrator password.

If your site is still intact, there is no need to reinstall Joomla or reconfigure and install your site from scratch. You will have to know how to navigate to and around your phpMyAdmin. MySQL is where all your data is stored and phpMyAdmin is the application you use to view the tables and views for the core data of your site. You can access all the Joomla tables, queries and views. It is important that you know what you are doing in the phpMyAdmin otherwise you could potentially delete important data essential to the site.

Here is a step by step guide on how to change your Joomla administrator password in phpMyAdmin:

1. Go to your phpMyAdmin.
2. Select the database you are using for the Joomla site, usually you will only have one. This value you entered when you first setup your Joomla site.
3. You will see a list of database tables on the left navigation.
4. If you used “jos” as your database prefix, which is the default, Click on the table “jos_users”.
5. Click on the “browse” button in top toolbar. This will show a list of all the users set up for your site.
6. Find the user whose password you want to change – the adminitrator username.
7. Click the Edit icon for this row.
8. A form will display that allows you to edit the password field.
9. The password is stored in HEX so you cannot just type in any phrase here. Copy this exact HEX value

d2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199

10. Paste the exact HEX value into your password field. Click “Go”.
11. phpMyAdmin should display the message “Affected rows: 1”.
12. Login to your Joomla site with your administrator and your password has been changed to:

secret

You should immediately change the administrator password to a more secure password that includes numbers, caps, symbols, and at least 8 characters long.

If you think there was a chance that your site was hacked, change the password for other users on the site as well and make sure when you log into the Joomla administrator that you check the User Manager to ensure all users registered are valid. Delete any suspicious users.

5 thoughts on “Joomla 1.5 Help- Reset Administrator Password

  1. I have followed these steps and I can’t access to my back-end. What’s going on?

    Joomla version: 1.6.

    Thanks in advance for your help.

  2. I have tested this with Joomla 1.6 and 1.7 and it simply does not work. It does work with 1.5. Please update your article to reflect that so you are not wasting peoples time. Thanks.

    Er1c

    1. Hi Eric,
      You are right. I created this Joomla tutorial for Joomla 1.5. I have updated the post to clearly identify the platform to apply this fix to. Will look into creating a revised tutorial applicable to Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7.
      Thanks for your visit and feedback,
      Elaine

  3. I tried this fix on my Joomla 1.7 website and it did not work. Tried to change the Superuser admin password. Went to phpmyadmin, found the appropriate users table, selected the ‘Browse’ tab, pasted the HEX value as shown into the password field and punched the “GO” button. The message shows that 1 row was updated, however the login using ‘secret’ as the new superuser admin password does not work.

    Is there another option?

    Thanks

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