I started fidgeting with a computer the other day that was given to me by a friend because he forgot his network and administrator password. He was wondering if I could fix it but I am basically at a loss.
He uses XP and has it password protected on the startup screen, so in other words, it automatically boots up and goes to a logo screen that requires a password to continue farther along.
After some fidgeting I get the administrator login to pop up. Great! I think but he had put a password there too and that is one that he didn’t remember either since he hadn’t used it since he first started up his PC. He couldn’t give me any good reason why he put all the protection up beforehand but he said that he was worried about hackers.
So, I am not sure if this will work, and I haven’t had time to do it yet, but I am thinking that I can use my password encryption files from XP and boot the PC up with a boot disk into DOS mode and then go in and simply replace his password encryption files with my own. Does anyone know if that will work? If it won’t, do you know what will?
Doesn’t the password hint help him any? People around here are pretty wary about answering password-cracking questions, even to long-time members like you, as you might have noticed.
Nope. I can give the hint but doubt it would help since he gave his password in c0d3sp3ak. He narrowed it down to about 15 possibilities beforehand (not includingthe codespeak) but then was at a complete loss.
As for the password cracking issue, I don’t really think this one skirts the line since it is about a home PC that isn’t networked. There is very little crossover between what I am trying to do with this PC and breaking into a network (since usually you do that remotely). If I can’t find a way to get into it, we will wind up formatting the drive and lose all the information on it, including a few thousand words of a novel that he didn’t back up.
Hmmm, maybe changing the secondary drive to a slave to a new primary (an old drive of mine) then booting it up from the new primary in a different operating system will allow me to do the workaround easier. But damn, that is too much work I know there is a much easier way to do it, I just haven’t had to work that way in a long time.
If it comes to reformatting, he can boot to DOS from the F8 menu, and back up the documents that way. I just checked the Microsoft website, and they offer no help on this subject. I don’t know about replacing the password files, but if that works, it’s sure a big security hole.
Give it a try, just rename the originals so you can get them back easily. Again, you ought to be able to do this from DOS.
What I think your saying, is to take his hard drive and make it a slave drive with your old drive being primary. I don’t see any problem with this. The older the OS the better too (harder to recognize security). Note though, you may get an error using his drive as a slave, maybe even a blue screen of death while trying to access it. For some reason, maybe it’s security, but when taking a primary WinXP drive and using it as primary on another system, there will be problems (I think XP is somehow uniquely linked to the IDE port). This might not be the case if it’s a slave though.
That is what I was worrying about yme. The oldest OS disk I have that will work in his PC (I have a crappy P200 that has a 1.4 gig drive in it) has Win95. However, the pins don’t match since it is so old. I can do it with WinME or 98. I have found some major security holes in varying MS products but I think I solved this one with a bootdisk and a program that automatically overwrites the password files. It took a lot of searching to find though and isn’t guaranteed to work. Luckily I still have computer security friends from when I somehow fell into that type of work.
Have a look at www.winxpnews.com - they’re always promoting a program for recovering admin passwords.
I can only assume it works, for as long as they’ve been hawking it. (The software vendor is a paying sponsor of WinXPnews) Cost is $70, which puts it into the “Well, it’s better than reformatting and reinstalling and losing everything” category.
There’s a free Linux bootdisk out there that can reset an NT\2000\XP password. Just search Google for “NT password linux disk” and you’ll find it. I’ve used it a couple of times with success. FWIW, do what the “best practices” say and reset the password to blank, not to some other password.
Voila! More info than you need to know, I got to say though, there special nifty process for creating a password reset floppy disk, should you, forget your PW, is brilliant.
