Reset Windows Passwords Offline
It’s been ages since I’ve had to do this, but for those of you in need, check out this bootable iso. You pop it in and follow the on screen prompts which will quickly allow you to clear or change any local windows account. Use at your own risk, though 🙂
Used it years ago with some success. It didn’t work on 1 of 10 computers in a class room and a completely killed another host with it (which was no problem as the alternative was reinstalling the box anyway).
I thought it wouldn’t work on newer windows version, only tried it with NT, 2000 and XP. (Yes I’m old and yes I haven’t done any Windows administration for some years now (besides my Windows XP / Windows 7 running in VMWARE on a Linux box))
@Jens
I want to say they claim support all the way up to win 7! I’ve not had this brick anything yet, but there’s always next time…hehe
I use this as a companion to ntpasswd: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/ Doesn’t work well on complex passwords but it’s been handy a few times that someone has dropped of a computer to be fixed and not left a login. 😉
In every single case it did not work, I found by doing a nice shut down it would mark the NTFS partition as “clean” and would enable me to use ntpasswd.
Indeed…Your mileage may vary. 😉