i have found my old laptop in the loft, with vista on and i have no clue what the password is to login.

i need to access it to grab some old documents.

any advice or tips.

many thanks

nick

ps. can email me if needed .

regards

http://www.pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

or remove the hdd and slave it to another pc (will require changing file permissions, but nothing outlandishly difficult or technical).

ermmm you should be able to boot into safe mood, log on as admin and manage accounts and sort out the password from there i believe….

When I had this problem with a friend’s pc, I just plugged the hard-drive in as a slave & copied the files off that way – much easier (for me, anyway).

Admin account is disabled by default on Vista so as z1ppy said.

I did the same with an Win XP laptop a while back. Check out Tech Support Forum because there’s a thread on there about downloading a certain piece of s/w that pulls out your password. Really easy to run. Should work on Vista too.

What z1ppy said.

Google emergency boot cd. It has password apps.

Knew I’d seen an article on it lately (but couldn’t find it yesterday)

that looks spot on.

any ideas how to make a bootable disc? i got the iso but now need to create a bootable disc to auto run??

im on a mac but could have access to a win machine.

thanks

write the ISO image to a CD – it will be bootable.

Note that for some PCs you might have to interrupt the boot sequence in order to get the machine to boot from the optical drive – watch what is displayed on screen just after you power on.

so just drop the iso in on a data disc and burn and it should be bootable correct??

It needs to be burnt as an ISO, with nero you can just double click it and nero does the rest, some other burners and older versions of nero will configure everything if you change the extension from .ISO to .NRG

Kind of correct! Most cd burning software should know what an iso is and make a disc from it.
An iso file being a disc image.
I right click an iso file choose ‘burn with imgburn’ and it does it’s thing.
You could however create a data disk with the iso file on which wouldn’t work for you.

rescue cd

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

to make usb sticks with linux distros on

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

assuming windoze – free cd burning
http://cdburnerxp.se/

yeah those above are correct, if you just dump the iso file on the cd and burn it, you will end up with a data cd with an iso file on it. You need something that will burn the iso image to the cd, the software recommended above will do it nice..

AUGISYF

if i extract the files from the iso and then burn it, will it work like that? or should i just get the other software people have mentioned?

ok just created the disc. went into the bios , changed the boot settings to cd, then hdd and it boots up into the login at windows and doesnt go into any booted software?

any ideas…..

better to just get the software they recommended.

need to change the boot order in the bios such that the CD/DVD is the first boot device

then when you switch on the pc you have a small amount of time after the bios post screen to push a key to tell it to boot off the cd.. if you don’t press anything.. it will then automatically boot off the next device (which will most likely be the hard drive).

ok so is that just any key or a specific one?

Guessing the CD didn’t get created properly, if you open it on the mac is it a load of files or just one *.iso file?

Try following this as it also mentions ophcrack which normally works.

Apologies if this is what you have already done though 🙂

http://www.imgburn.com

Best CD writing software by a mile.

The ‘ISO’ is like a photograph of a CD. An exact copy.

When you burn an ISO, it’s like imprinting that photograph onto the CD, so you create another replica.

hey vanman,. yes thats what i had done.

so i guess thats completed right.

so thanks for all your help. managed to get it to boot up BUT now it does everything is says and finds my username but says under nt pwd that no password is found?

i tried now just pressing enter to log in and doesnt work, so must be a password on the account?

nick

change the password anyway & try again?

i dont see an option to change the password in ophcrack??

sorry assumed you were talking about “offline NT password editor”.. wasn’t really following the thread.. Opps…

no probs.. im stuck guys. cant seem to get any further?

nick

Sorry about not responding earlier, work got in the way. If ophcrack didn’t find a password try one of the other utilities mentioned above (or google xp password recovery), now that you have a boot cd it shouldn’t take long. Ophcrack tries a brute force dictionary attack if memory serves, so just cause it failed doesn’t mean one of the others won’t work.

there is a password recovery editor on ebcd. Works every time for me, you just over write the existing passwords. Easy.

ebcd

edit actually dunno if it works with vista, but if you need the data then just download a live cd version of linux, load it, copy the data to an external hard drive.

Nick, if you get stuck just post it to me with a usb stick and I’ll get the data off for you in return for love and good feelings.

If the ebcd one is the one I’ve used in the past, it’s slightly bugged – you can reset the Administrator account, but it has to be to a blank password (i.e. login as Administrator, no password when you boot back up)

Can’t remember the tool name, but it was used off a linux boot disk. Worked every time with that caveat though.

brassneck – I think you are right. I haven’t used it for a while as I use linux Live CD (on bootable usb AMAP) these days to hack into other PC’s. Live cd gives you a gui and the like along with the terminal, just more pleasant to use..

i would do, but im in innsbruck, austria.

so postage would cost a fair bit lol….

id also like to be able to use the laptop again so changing the password or just removing it would be great.

i understand nothing of the ebcd. i just searched it and not sure where the password recovery is.

i need an iso to as im on a mac and need to burn the iso as i cant run a .exe file.

thanks for your time guys