Locked out of Windows XP - Advice?

longhornjoe03

longhornjoe03

100+ Posts
Last week at work we had a little bit of drama concerning our resident "tech" guy/crackhead. He objected to doing his job rather than playing Half-Life and walked out...but not after resetting the passwords for all of the user accounts on his computer, of course.

Being, now, the most knowledgable computer guy in the office, I've been asked to see what I can do about getting Crackhead's computer operational again. I know that there are ways to reset the password using different programs (ie. ERD Commander), but I've heard of some "other" tools that exist that are far less expensive.

A buddy of mine hooked me up with an app called Linboot, that boots from a bootable cd and allows the resetting of passwords; but it doesn't work and seems to be incomplete.

Can anyone help me out?
 
Thanks MisterBevo. I'd found some of those programs after i posted my original post. It looks like they're highly recommended.

So far, I've tried 3 different boot-cds (Trinity, EBCD 0.6 & another one that i cant remember) and and none of them have worked. It looks like they aren't able to find my XP partition. The computer is pretty new, the boot-cds might not support the HD controller. Damn.

I'm going to keep trying, though. I'm going to crack this thing. Any other suggestions are very welcome...
smokin.gif
 
blacklab,

The iso at that webpage seems to be the most recommended on out there. Unfortunately, it, like the others, does not recognize any partitions on Crackhead's computer and subsequently can't mount the HD.

It's almost like I need to locate a HD driver for my drive and add it to the boot-cd. But what do I know?
confused.gif


Is that even possible?
 
Is the drive ide or scsi?
An ide drive shouldn't need drivers, a scsi will need drivers for the controller.
 
I'm almost positive that it's SCSI; there are only IDE devices listed in the bios (CD and DVD drives). Thing is, I can't find any info for SCSI anywhere. Nothing in the Bios, and the PC loads so fast, reading anything while it boots is impossible.

If you couldn't tell, all of this is a little bit beyond what troubleshooting I'm used to.
smile.gif
Is there an easy way to check out the specs if the HD is SCSI?
 
open up the box and see what it says on the card that's connected to the hard drive. The manufacturer of the card should have some dos drivers on it's website that you can put onto your boot floppy.
 
Ahaaaa.....

I popped open the case and found twin Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drives. Not IDE, not SCSI.

Thinking about things, this computer is set up with RAID. Wouldn't this be a logical reason for the Linux-based boot-cd not to be able to load the XP partition? And if this is so, am I S.O.L.?

God, I hate that Crackhead.....
mad.gif
 
I think you may be sol.
I poked around for a linux driver for the SATA and could not find one.
You may be able to get support at seagate.com, I didn't look too long.
 
is the computer on a network? Did he change the administrator password as well?

This happens a lot where I work (in IT) but our help desk just logs on as an administrator and changes their password to some generic password until we are done with the computer.
 
I may be SOL, but i'm not going to go down without a fight. I'm thinking that with Knoppix we might be able to grab the SAM file and crack it with a SAM cracker. Reason being, Knoppix is the only boot-cd that hasn't told me that it cant find a XP partition....so we'll see.

This guy has changed all of the passwords and disabled the guest account--we've got nothing from the network.

To make matters worse, we just called Compaq support and were informed that he registered this computer IN HIS NAME and that only he can authorize the helpdesk for support.
mad.gif


Another option that that just occurred to me is to reinstall XP onto another partition. Is that feasable? Would I need a Partition Magic-type utility to create the new partition first?


ARRRGHHH!!!!!!!
 
I think the solution is to take the 4 biggest guys in the office over to that guy's house and kick his *** until he tells you the passwords.
 
Requires Windows 2000 disk.

This method is guaranteed to work due to a inherent flaw in Windows XP's security, but it needs a Windows 2000 disk to work. Just go into the BIOS and set it so you can boot from CD. Then insert the Windows 2000 disk and reset. Choose Recovery Console instead of a regular installation, and you should be able to log in as Admin on the computer.

Failing that, I'd just remove the hard drive, insert it as slave into another computer, copy the important files over, remove it, reset it to master, and reformat the computer. Not much else you can do for free. The Linux based options probably aren't working because your drives are formatted to NTFS instead of FAT32.
 
Hey SATA does work with linux, I run a raptor at home. the 2.6.x kernel should support it, however it is still rather experimental, the problem lies with the SATA controller not the hardrive itself, see if you can get the name. I had a ***** of a time recognizing it with a LiveCD 3 months ago and knoppix had probs too, try getting the gentoo liveCD 2004 or 2004.1 if anything you should be able to at least mount the drive, or get the name of your SATA controller, it worked for me.
 
If you couldn't tell, this has been a bit consuming for me. I've been away from the office since 6:30 and I'm still thinking about this stuff...

Ags,
I've heard of The 2000 method before, but I think that I read somewhere that Microsoft has fixed that glitch.

Here's the current status: I did finally manage to locate a linux boot cd that uses the 2.6 kernel; [fingers crossed]I should have some kind of SATA support now. [/fingers crossed] Now that I've got the ability to mount these puppies, I need to do something that I've been meaning to for a while....learn some Linux!

I'm a little bit weary of the "chntpw" utility on these boot disks. My understanding is that when they rewrite the password hashes, you will lose access to any files that that user has special permission to. Would it be too easy to think that just reassigning the permissions once the Admin. logon is repaired would fix the password protected files? You see, Crackhead was in charge of alot of important data, being able to minimize what might be lost is a big priority right now.

My other concern is in actually navigating the whole procedure. I'm about the biggest Linux nOOb out there. I remember working with DOS when I was like 12, but that's where it ends. I probably couldn't tell you how to mount a drive right now. I need to locate a plain and simple guide to using Linux. If I'm going to be manipulating these hard drives, I'd feel alot more confident actually knowing the OS a little more. Crashing them would mean alot of my time down the drain....plus I'm due for a review very soon....
biggrin.gif


Anyhow, I wanted to thank everyone who has given me their input so far. To say the least, this has all been educational. Throwing things out and actually getting feedback by people who actually know what they're doing has been a big help. Thanks, and I promise that when football season comes around I'll buy anyone there who helps me out on this thread a cold beer at the tailgates....
wink.gif
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Weekly Prediction Contest

* Predict HORNS-AGGIES *
Sat, Nov 30 • 6:30 PM on ABC

Recent Threads

Prediction Results Threads

2024 Schedules

Back
Top