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Windows Vista Password Recovery


Chandler H

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Hey, a friend of mine bought an older computer from his employer than is running Vista Home Premium, but his employer has forgotten the administrator password and has no password recovery disk. So my friend hired me to break into it. I'm having problems though. I've tried using OPHCrack on a live disk, but for some reason it can't find the password. Anyone have any ideas?

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Can't think of the names of any off hand but there are loads of live disks that will just clear the password. Trinity or something similar was the last one I used.

 

Or you could just get a newer OS and reinstall it, probably cheaper than paying you to do it, especially if you go for Linux.

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Offline NT Password https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

I think that's the one that's included with Trinity too, but it's a stand alone thing.  You can blank or change the password, just know that if anything is encrypted with the user password it will be lost forever.  

But I agree with diginija, it would probably be best to just wipe and reload the os or put a new one on it.  Vista is a terrible os so linux would work out better in the long run.

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You could also try tools like konboot which should work as well.

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I wouldn't personally waste my time trying to get the password.

1.  Boot the PC into a Kali thumbdrive

2.  Mount the Windows partition

3.  CD into the System32 directory on the Windows partition and create a backup of sethc.exe

4.  Copy cmd.exe into sethc.exe

5.  Reboot the PC and at the login prompt hit the shift key a bunch of times until your SYSTEM command prompt comes up

6.  Now you can create a new user or simply change the password of an existing user.

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