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Bypass password in Win2000 Pro?

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by mja 1 view

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I have a client that has Win2000 Pro on a laptop and cannot recall her password. What steps if any can I do to recover, change or delete the password so she may be able to get into her system? Thanks!

7 replies

by brian

There are 2 solutions- The one you chose depends on the file system.
A-Fat
B-NTFS

A-
If you've installed Win2k on a partition formatted with FAT or FAT32, it's not all that hard:

Boot your computer using a DOS or Windows 9x boot disk.
Type:
CD C:\winnt\system32\config

and press Enter to change to the folder where your passwords are stored. (Of course, if you've installed Windows to a folder other than C:\winnt, you should substitute the correct folder name in the command above.)

Delete the SAM file by typing:
DEL sam.*

and pressing Enter.

Remove the boot floppy and restart your machine.
When prompted for a logon name, use Administrator with a blank password.
One word of warning: The SAM file defines all the user accounts on the computer. When you delete it, you'll lose all user accounts

by brian

B-
If Win2k is on an NTFS partition, things are a lot tougher (that's why this is the file system to opt for if you want to make your computer as secure as possible). You can use a password recovery (read 'cracking') utility such as LC3 or Locksmith, but they aren't cheap. A less expensive alternative is Elcomsoft's Advanced NT Security Explorer (ANTExp) which goes for $49 (that's for a personal licence, a business licence will set you back $149). With the latter you'll still need to create a DOS boot disk with NTFS support in order to access the SAM file, then run ANTExp on a functioning Windows machine to recover the password from SAM. If you want to know how to do that, check out this Computing.net article.
http://www.computing.net/faq/contentnt/lostpw.html
These programs all use brute force to recover the password and that means the process can be lengthy.

There is a cheaper alternative. That's to use Linux. There's a free utility called the NT Admin Boot Disk available from The NT Toolbox.
www.nttoolbox.com
Click the Downloads link on the site's home page to find it and make sure you download both the updated BIN file and the original NT Admin Boot Disk. The latter contains an outdated BIN file (that's why you wantthe updated version as well) plus the rawrite.exe utility, which lets you create a boot floppy from the BIN file.

This little gem boots into Linux with NTFS file support and resets the administrator's password. It's not particularly user friendly(we are talking Linux here, folks), but it will get the job done and leave your wallet intact.

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