Change or Reset NT passwords
Monday, May 26th, 2008This 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
