Vista password recovery

[Karbon Killa]

So I'm trying to help a friend out with one of their computer mishaps. While they were drunk the other night, I guess they changed their password, and now cannot remember what they changed it to. Going into safe mode there is no administrator account other than hers. I've tried ophcrack_vista on a CD-R and a DVD-R with no luck. Reformatting is not an option here unfortunately. Any way to find the lost password or recover it through a linux live cd? I'm pretty stuck at the moment. All advice helps.

[ablatman]

So I'm trying to help a friend out with one of their computer mishaps. While they were drunk the other night, I guess they changed their password, and now cannot remember what they changed it to. Going into safe mode there is no administrator account other than hers. I've tried ophcrack_vista on a CD-R and a DVD-R with no luck. Reformatting is not an option here unfortunately. Any way to find the lost password or recover it through a linux live cd? I'm pretty stuck at the moment. All advice helps.

If you can find the password hash, there are sites where you can throw up the hash and people can check their tables for it....

It really helps if you know how long it the password is.

[BigMyke]

http://techrena.blogspot.com/2009/03/windows-password-recoverycrack-windows.html

follow this site to double check your steps that ou used when on using OPHcrack.

[CrazyJoe]

Excellent link BigMyke !

If all else fails, go the "reset Password" route. At least it will get you in the door.

I remember when we had a customer that had passworded his hard-drive as well as his OS. Luckily we were able to get in far enough to reset the password on the drive.

[ablatman]

...Luckily we were able to get in far enough to reset the password on the drive.

How exactly? Was it a Dell?

[Karbon Killa]

So with the OPHcrack live cd's, the computer just never read them or booted them. I don't understand how I can put them on the cd a wrong way.

[rubidium]

It's far easier to remove a password than it is to crack one. To that end, I have used this (http://www.password-changer.com/) successfully to do exactly what you want to do, on both XP and Vista. Everything will be there as it was, except the account password will be made blank. Afterwards - and when your friend is sober - she can change her password from blank to whatever in the standard way.


Edit: OPHcrack works reasonably well on alphanumeric passwords less than about 14 characters in length, but in my experience gives "ougatz" when there are any non-alphanumeric characters present.

[KaptCrunch]

other is rollback with system restore