XP Pro Logon Problems

[DuceGT]

Hi everyone,

Heres what happened...

I was at my dad's place and to my surprise I found an open wireless connection and connect just fine. I then wanted to find out who I was connection to so I switched it from his work's domain to trying to guess their workgroup as MSHOME. After changing the settings I had to reboot and after entering the correct user name/password, It wouldn't work because it was trying to connect to the domain. Clicking on options doesnt expose any more options like it does sometime. I beleive it would be a peice of cake to fix, someone would just need to logon with admin and change it back to the domain, but I was wondering if there would be anyway I could loop around that to fix. Once again, the OS is XP Pro and I've tried the safe modes and last working cofig with no luck, aswell as disabling all the NIC drivers in the BIOS...Any input from you guys would be great, thank you.

-Brandon

 

[Dahak]

sounds like the username/password that you are trying to login as is only a domain account. What you may have to do is boot up into safe mode and login as administrator and create a new local user account

 

[mechBgon]

Just FYI, major faux pas bringing your personal system onto their network without asking first.

 

[ND40oz]

Yeah, your the guy that causes the 8 am, Monday morning call that I can't login to my laptop anymore

You won't be able to fix it most likely as you can't rejoin the laptop back to the domain. The domain user name and password get cached and that's probably how your dad logs in when he's not at worked, with the cached credentials.

He'll have to take it in to work, call the helpdesk, and they'll rejoin it to the domain.

 

[mikecel79]

Originally posted by: ND40oz
Yeah, your the guy that causes the 8 am, Monday morning call that I can't login to my laptop anymore

Hopefully his dad's doesn't work at my place of employment!

 

[Smilin]

rofl. Nice job, kid!

It will take your Dad's system admin about 2 minutes to fix this but you're screwed. I can just hear your Dad's call now, "Yeah my kid was on my computer and..."

 

[DuceGT]

lol thnx for the help guys ... i ended up using a linux live boot cd and i found the list of user names and had the ability to change passwords, but first i found one that let me long into admin with no pw...ill tell dad to let the help desk guys know that too ... ND40z nailed it...just had to get a user name and password for him to login into the domain and presto!

 

[Smilin]

So you were able to add his computer back into the domain or just get him logged on?

 

[DuceGT]

i was able to just get logged in under admin...needed a totatl diff pw and such from the tech support ppl from his work to log back on the domain...no biggie...and im very suprised how easy it would be to crack into any xp pro setup

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: DuceGT
i was able to just get logged in under admin...needed a totatl diff pw and such from the tech support ppl from his work to log back on the domain...no biggie...and im very suprised how easy it would be to crack into any xp pro setup

As you have discovered, if you have physical access to any machine you can break into it quite easily. This is true for any OS (even non MS ones). I wasn't surprised to hear you got into the machine. What would have surprised me is if you were able to add the machine back to the domain on your own. This would have meant you broke into the domain for all practical purposes. This isn't such an easy task, although it sounds like the admins at your dad's work slack a bit. A little social hacking might have gotten you past those guys.