Thursday, August 28, 2014

How to recover the Administrator password in Windows XP






I want to login to my Administrator account in Windows XP, but I forgot the password. I really don't want to reinstall the OS. I remember some years ago, I was facing a similar problem and I was able to boot using linux from a USB device, save a "password file" from the Windows directory, and use brute force on it from another machine to find out the password.


Is there a smarter way to reset or recover my Windows XP Administrator password?


Answer



Well, it should be in %systemroot%\system32\config - its a file called SAM. However its a lot easier to use the nt offline password changer, than to use ophcrack or other password cracking tool - in most cases its a lot faster (minutes rather than hours) unless you have an encrypted partition


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