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Change or Reset NT passwords

This article is a bit off topic on this blog but I found the tool so powerful and easy to use that I wanted to share this.

I needed to start a computer running Windows XP SP2. The former user had a password on his account (account with admin rights) and I had no way to contact him.

I used a tool which allows editing or resenting the password of any of the user account on the computer.
That doesn’t recover the password (at least I don’t think so), that allows to reset or to allocate a new one. According to their website it works for Windows NT versions : 2000, XP, Vista.

Here is the link: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Basically you simply need to

  • Download the CD image (.iso file) and burn is as an image on a CD (or DVD) (it also work with a floppy disk)
  • Boot from that CD (you may need to modify the boot sequence in the Bios)
  • You will be asked a few question like which partition is Windows installed on, where is the registery with the SAM file … (some value are added by default and if your configuration is “classic”, they will be the correct ones)
  • Change or reset the password for a user (you can retreive the list of users)
  • Save the changes and restart the computer

You need less that 10 minutes all together. That’s brillant.

That also makes you realise a few security threats on a windows computer : get the boot sequence to start from the hard drive first (that will prevent anyone trying to boot your computer with that kind of software and change your password) and also lock the Bios changes with a password so that anyone cannot change the boot sequence.

Guillaume

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Tips or Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Change or Reset NT passwords”

  1. John Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 2:17 am

    (It’s almost always a Bad Idea to require an email address for things like this.)

    I just thought I’d point this out: in most computer systems, anyone who has physical hardware access to the computer can get in to bypass just about any security measure. This applies to any system, Unix, Windows, Linux, Mac…. As soon as the operating system is no longer in control, anything goes. In Linux, for example, changing the kernel params to include init=/bin/sh will usually bypass the entire login system, providing root access (this was how I recovered CoLinux, since I forgot my password). Additionally, one can boot to a CD or repair floppy, and chroot and run passwd to change the password.

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