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Almost a year ago, we have designed website for Indian Computer Institute, a well known computer training institute in New Delhi. We have deployed the Joomla in cloud server and handed all charge to the technical director Mr. Nirmal.

But some days ago, we received a mail in our tracking center also call from the institute saying website is down. When we have received mail, we thought client is doing some changes themselves, but they told website is not loading.

We had a look and found some issues with Joomla installation. Then we tried to login to Joomla Administration to check whether there are any error message.

But, the credentials we have sent them were changed by their updating team for privacy reason. We generally suggest and guide them to do so.

If you are using Blogger read this : How to Add CommentLuv platform in your Blog?

As server is with us, we have access to MySQL database. We opened the database of their Joomla website in phpMyAdmin and reset the password. But why we took time to write this article? We expect this article to answer following questions.

1. I have forgot my Joomla Administration password, how can I login to admin panel?
2. How to recover Joomla administration password from backend?
3. How to recover Joomla administration password using phpMyAdmin?
4. How to reset Super Administrator password in Joomla?

Let’s go to the error page itself.

How to Reset/recover Joomla Admin Password?

Step 1: Login to phpMyAdmin from your hosting area. phpMyAdmin is an online MySQL management script that is widely used and a standard tool to manage MySQL database on web hosting system. phpMyAdmin is used here for demonstration, you can use any other tool to get this done but steps are almost similar.

Step 2: Select the Joomla database of your installation, you can find this in your configuration.php file located in root folder of Joomla installation directory.

Step 3: Search for [highlight color=”green”]users[/highlight] table and open its data. There might be some database prefix, where multiple applications are installed in single database or in most cases, there is already some random prefix separating table name with (_) underscore symbol.

SELECT *
FROM 'prefix_users'

Now you will see the list of users. Alternatively you can run the above query and the result will be similar like in above screenshot.

Step 4: Select the master user you have created and click on Edit (pencil icon) on left corner near select checkbox of that record. You will be directed to Edit screen. Now look for password column and change the data type to MD5 from table. 

Update the value of password as your wish. You will see the text in clear text for now but once you submit the data, MySQL will automatically change data to MD5 hashed value so no one can decrypt your password. The script for this task will be almost like this if you don’t prefer the graphical way.

UPDATE  `Joomla`.`ehj3v_users` 
SET  `password` = MD5(  'Pas$w0rd' ) 
WHERE  `ehj3v_users`.`id` =17;

Step 5: Ohh, nothing more left here. If you are running query, you have just done it already. If you are on graphical way, just hit the Go button on the bottom of form to submit the changes.

Done. You have successfully changed the password for Super Administrator from MySQL administration. If you find this article helpful and useful, share. Someone might be in need of these simple steps to avoid the loss of their data as they lost Joomla Admin Password.