Thread: Repairing Windows and Recovery

Hello all,
i used to have an HP a400n with an 80gb harddrive. one day, the computer crashed and i had to replace the motherboard. once the motherboard was replaced, i turned on the computer and i needed to repair windows so it would work. i went into the repair console and had to type in the administrator password. i typed in my password, i left it blank, i typed in admin and admisistrator for passwords but apparently it was not the password. I called HP and since my warranty was expired, they were going to charge me 50 dollars for them to tell me the password. i decided against. now my oldharddrive is in my computer as the slave and im running the os off a different harddrive. my question is is there anyway to find out the administrator password if the device is attached as a slave? (i havent changed any files in it so it is like the day it crashed). by the way, i cant access any folders in the drive and there is no security tab in "properties".

any help would be appreciated

You could try to crack the password with Ophcrack. If it fails to determine your admin password, there's probably a way to reset it with Knoppix. First try Ophcrack and let us know how it goes.

will that only work on a master? or will it work on a slave too?

get a Linux liveCD
(Either Knoppix or Ubuntu will do fine)

once booted in the liveCD
do:

Code:

apt-get install chntpw

this will download and install the program "chntpw" (change NT password)

Mount the windows partition
open up a terminal, and navigate to
windows/system32/config
and run chntpw (change "administrator" to the username you want to change the password for)

Code:

chntpw -u administrator SAM

You will be prompted for a password
(if you want to remove the password completely, enter an asterisk at the prompt)

reboot and login to windows using the newly changed password

sounds complicated

Yeah, what Ynot said is exactly what I was thinking of. As for Ophcrack working on a drive attached as a slave, I don't know. You can download it for free and try it. If it doesn't work, just download a bootable Linux distro like Knoppix, burn it to a CD, boot it up, and run chntpw.