Need help with Windows 2000 password recovery

[NYHoustonman]

Trying to fix my friend's computer, but he doesn't know the username/password for an administrator account (windows 2000 professional), so I can't really do much. What I'm thinking is, if he can't dig it up somewhere, I can bring over a HD with 98 installed and access things that way... But my question is, how could I go about recovering the username/password?

 

[wraith3k]

I've used this before, but you need a floppy drive to create a boot disk:

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

 

[Atheus]

1) Boot another system. This doesn't have to be another windows, It could be a DOS boot disk (if it's formatted fat32) or linux or NTFSDOS (if NTFS). If you do choose to boot your win98 remember it will only read fat32.

2) Grab the SAM file. It is stored in two places - %systemroot%\system32\config\sam and %systemroot%\repair\sam._ so copy one of these onto another disk or partition. You may heve to extract the LM hash with 'saminside'.

3) Crack the LM hash. There are various ways to do this, like with l0phtcrack dictionary attack, but the best way is rainbow tables. Rainbow tables is a time-memory trade-off hash cracker which can break windows passwords in seconds or minutes (depending on hardware) _but_ you must generate or download the 'rainbow tables' for LM first.

 

[Slikkster]

lol, sounds like you know just a wee bit too much about cracking passwords, atheus...

Just razzin ya.

I think the link the previous poster gave is the best bet. He really doesn't need to restore the old admin password, but rather just reset it, which is what the offline NT Password App will do.

 

[NYHoustonman]

Originally posted by: theslug
I've used this before, but you need a floppy drive to create a boot disk:

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

Considering I don't understand half of what Atheus said, I think I'm gonna try this 😉, thanks.