Forgot Administrator's password! 5

[saqi2000]

I know it's very silly but it was very early in the morning when I changed my password in user manager for domains > file > properties and changed the password there and now I can't get back into the system. Is there any way round to this? At present this is stand alone it was going to be connected to a small network.

Thanks

Saqi

 

[Grenage]

Be pretty poor security if you could eh ?

 

[saqi2000]

Grenege,

it's just a home machine. Installed NT Server to keep my data private. I had this installed more than 3 years but today is the bad day i changed the password while i was half a sleep.

 

[aker]

saqi2000- try the following site.

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Regards.

 

[Grenage]

Do you have any other accounts on the system you can log in with other than Administrator ?

 

[saqi2000]

Yes, I do have but they don't have much access.

 

[Grenage]

Well there are programs that will give you a list of the passwords on the machine, although the decent ones you generally have to pay for.

 

[LeTay]

Saqi,
A few years ago I had a bootable Linux floppy disk. After booting, it started a program that was able to 'patch' a password for existing local accounts with new password. I used it a few time in the same situation as you. I don't know where to find this but certainly somewhere on the Web ...

 

[saqi2000]

Guys,

thanks very much for your help. But I went with easiest option reinstall NT Server.

Thanks for all your help you guys are stars of the computing world.

Saqi

 

[fitfixer]

Saqi could have ran the "repair" option in the NT4 Server install, first booting from the CD and running winnet /b from the i386 folder on the CD, this would have the effect of restoring the old password

 

[BozoDaKlone]

The "repair" option mentioned by *fitfixer*'s post will ask for a ERD. The user, it seems, does not have one.

Without access to the SAM, not much to do here...

If he can get the SAM, he could also use L0phat Crack. I tested this and it took about 1 week to guess the admin password.

AS for the ERD, it has its own issues. For example, if RDISK is run without /S, it will save the *original* SAM, not the current one.

If the admin pw is not set for lock-out, user could bruteforce from the network. Could take a long time.

Yikes, what a mess.

 

[elrub2]

I have run into this problem before. I used a program called cia commander. It only works with ntfs, you just boot with it. It's pretty straight forward from there.

 

[saqi2000]

Elrub2,

where would I get CIA Commander?

Thanks to all of yous for help

Saqi

 

[saqi2000]

Scal,

the url

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

does not work.

Saqi

 

[aker]

saqi2000- I thought my little post had gone unnoticed way up there in the beginning.

The URL does work, I just clicked on your link and was taken direct to the page. I hit CRTL-F5 to refresh the browser in case it was cached and loaded again. There is another link:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

which takes you direct to the download page for creating the boot disk, but the former page has some nice instructions all about the utility.

If you're really desperate, leave your email and I will send it to you by post, if it's not contravening any copyright laws.

Regards.

 

[saqi2000]

Scal,

thanks for your help. I will give a shot from home machine incase they have barred those sites from work.

Thanks

Again

 

[elrub2]

Saqi,
I found it on cnet, just do a search for "cia commander".
Later,

 

[saqi2000]

Elrub,

thanks again I will download it and give it a go.

Thanks

Saqi

 

[jasonboyes]

A friend sent me this:

There are a couple of ways to get into the NT machine. If the
boot/system
partition is FAT, then a DOS boot diskette will get you in. The
procedure
is as follows:
Boot into DOS from the diskette
What you want to accomplish is to get a CMD/Dos type screen when the
logon
screen saver would kick in.
To do this:
From DOS, find the file called logon.scr (maybe logon.scn??) in the
winnt\system32 subdirectory. Rename this file to something like
logon.bak.
Make a copy of cmd.exe and call it logon.scr (or whatever the original
file
was called) - the syntax would be:
copy cmd.exe logon.scr

Once this is done, reboot the machine and let it boot normally into nt
workstation. When it starts up, don't touch it for about 15-20
minutes.

Then the logon screen saver will kick in, if the preceeding was done
correctly, you will get a black, dos-like screen. This just happens to
be
full administrator access to NT. At this command line, type the
following:
net user administrator *

It will come back and ask for a new password. Type in whatever you
want,
reenter it at the next prompt and then log in as administrator with the
new
password. Reboot and log in as administrator with the new password and
then
go from there. Don't forget to go back into winnt\system32 and delete
logon.scr (the 'fake' one) and rename logon.bak to logon.scr (ren
logon.bak
logon.scr) - again.

If NT is installed into an ntfs partition, this won't work - you would
need
the commercial version of ntfsdos to accomplish the same thing.