I am trying to reinstall win 7 on a friends laptop. They have forgotten the admin password but I can access the user account. I can't make a recovery cd and when I hold down F8 at boot and access recovery that way I eventually get snarled with another password request although I believe this one is down to some T mobile software as this laptop was provided in a government scheme? Any ideas or is it a no go .
if you want to keep the password in order still you can run ophcrack boot cd, which will normally work out the password using rainbow tables and magic. If keeeping the password the same is not important then yeah boot with hirens and change it with that - works a treat.
Hirens, hmm that's a coincidence, I just made a USB hirens bootable stick, I'll give that a whirl, thanks.
There's a tool in Mini XP which does the very trick. I've forgotten the name though but it's definitely there. Or there's Offline NT Password...from the first Menu of Hiren's. It's a text based job running through the linux kernel. Pretty straight forward and you don't have to wait for Mini XP to load.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/passrecovery.htm Ophcrack will show you the password but it can be fiddly (I found it was anyway, maybe I didn't understand the instructions initially). Offline NT Password and Registry editor is the easiest but will only allow you to remove the password. I don't think I managed to get any version of Kon-Boot to work. I haven't tried any of the others.
I used Hirens and Offline NT Password in the end and worked like a treat, new install of win 7 is now on and currently updating Thanks for the help guys.
The laptop only has 1gb of ram in it so I was going to stick an extra gig that I had knocking about in for him out of kindness of my own heart but do you think I can find the damn thing!!!!!! No where in sight, gonna have to turn the house upside down tomoz.
Kon-boot! Love that software, have a USB stick with it on at all times. Boot off it, and all of a sudden, what passwords?
God, Kon-Boot is pretty pricy if you want to use it commercially, though. Annoying, because I like the sound of it, much better than simply stripping passwords off permanently.
If you're going to use Ophcrack you may as well just get a Backtrack Live CD. You can download the ISO from their site and boot direct to the disk, it has a forensics mode that leaves no traces... not that you'd need that if its a friend's laptop...
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html However.. it doesnt crack the password - just blanks it.. works everytime!
Same thing that I mentioned months ago. It's part of Hiren's Boot CD. Oh and it will let you change the password rather than just blanking it. Not quite true. It will often clean the shutdown for you without having to boot back into Windows just to shut down again.
