What is the best program bootable from a CD to crack a vista / win7 password.

[blankslate]

Have a friend of my dad who has a computer they forgot the password for.

I've found ophcrack, offline nt password & registry editor, and pc login now 2.0

The typical method is to make a bootable CD with then boot for the CD drive.




Their account documents containing pictures, video and music were easily copied and not encrypted.

the Last resort could be to just use an iso of vista home premium to reinstall the OS onto the computer.


Anyone which any experience with this problem have any better suggestions?

 

[boochi]

Offline NT Password..... is what I use to clear passwords. It does not crack them, it just removes the password so you can get in to windows. Cracking programs like ophcrack are really for malicious use only, as they allow you a chance to get in without the owner knowing you were there.

 

[blankslate]

The person gave us the computer. And told us "I forgot the password." So he knows we're trying to circumvent the account password.

 

[Demo24]

I used ophcrack on a winxp machine, and it did the job quite well even on older hardware. Have not tested on anything newer.

 

[Underclocked]

PC Login Now

 

[ImDonly1]

Not sure if it still works, but in Windows XP, you can boot into safe mode and login to the default admin account. Then, you can go to control panel, users, and remove the password for accounts.

 

[Mark R]

Vista/7/8 use a much more complex password hash than XP. Cracking is still possible, but is much, much slower and requires massive (multi-terabyte) and potentially expensive ($1000+) dictionary tables to have a good probability of success.

As to the original question. As none of the files are encrypted, you don't need to crack the password. Simply use a password removal tool, such as Offline NT password and registry editor. This will reset the password, and provide you access.

 

[gevorg]

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

works like a charm

 

[Cienja]

I used BartPE to get into a laptop running Windows 7...maybe XP, I don't recall.

 

[blankslate]

we just ended up copying the user's files to separate HD then used the restore partition to return the computer to factory shipping condition then recopied the files back over.