A password reset utility that really works.

All;

I do not know if you all read the thread from Rugby1 where he locked himself out of his system. I thought that the fix I found for him warrents a thread on its own.

Basically, Rugby1 lost/forgot his admin password. At first, I did not know how to help him. Being the tenacious, never say it can't be done guy that I am, I dug around for a solution. I found a free utility that works so well, that it scares me. I work in a high security environment, and that all just got tossed out the Windows™.

I tested the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor;

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

It is a Linux boot disk that comes in either CD or floppy format. The CD is generally meant to be used with servers, for it has SCSI drivers on it for all the popular RAID and SCSI controllers. The floppy is just a bare bones boot disk for non-SCSI PC's.

I tested the utility on a Dell OptiPlex GX260 with Windows 2000 Pro, and an HP Proliant DL380 with Windows 2000 Advanced Server.

On the GX260, the program works great, as long as you blank the password, and do not try to set it. If you try to set it, the "Computer Management" utility will report an internal error and the Administrator account will not show up. You will have to go to the "Users and Passwords" control panel. There you will find the Administrator account, and that is where you will have to reset it. Go back to "Computer Management", and the error is gone and the Administrator account is back.

On the DL380, I had a different problem. The CD booted fine, but the partitions are not immediately available. You need to tell it to load the SCSI drivers. The program can discover the correct drivers to load if you tell it to “autoprobe”. You have to “autoprobe” one time for each SCSI controller that you have. I had to do it twice, once for the “cciss” driver, and once for the “aic7xxx” driver. If you want, you can manually load each SCSI driver. Just enter the number that appears before your drivers name. This is preferred if they have to be loaded in a certain order.

The problem that I had was not being able to access the partitions. The software saw them and listed them. It showed each with a number from 0 to 2. The first one was the CD-ROM; the last two were hard drive partitions. I tried both 1 and 2, but it just would not bring them up. I even tried loading just one SCSI driver and not the other. No error message, no clue as to why the partition could not be accessed. Needless to say, tenacious me will find out why. Perhaps I just need to update the SCSI drivers. Either way, I will keep you informed.

If you use this utility, back up the system first. I later had problems with the GX260 that could only be resolved by restoring from the backup.

One last thought. If you are responsible for a Windows network; keep this utility to yourself. I am so happy I am still using Novell.

Close Hauled

 

Hi close_hauled.

Very nice post, and a good solution for Rubgy1 and any other souls that may get locked out.

------------------*****THUMBS UP*****-------------------

Cheers, TAS

 

More to add to this story...

The DL380 has a RAID controller and a dual channel SCSI controller on it. The system boots from the RAID controller, so I am only concerned with getting it started. The RAID controller requires a cciss.o driver file. The driver that ships with the disk coms from HP.

When the cciss driver loads, I get the following message:

Then I press "Q" to quit selecting drivers and I get:

Pressing "A" gets me this message:

Pressing "L" gets me this message:

Pressing "1" gets me this message:

Pressing "0" gets me this message:

That is as far as I have been able to get with the DL380 so far.

I am in contact with the developer of the disk. Hopefully he can help in getting this to work.

Close Hauled

 

I sent an e-mail to the developer of the “Offline Password & Registry Editor” in regards to the problem that I was having with the DL380. I sent him all of the details in the previous post, and here is what he had to say:

Close Hauled

 

Last week, I asked the developer of this disk what was the best way to protect systems from his program. Here is his reply:

My company use to encrypt the entire system, but stopped. Now they rely on Windows encryption.

 

I tried that dynamic disk thing once with W2K (and only once). I didn't notice any preformance difference, and it just made a mess. Maybe it is better in XP but I'll not be trying it again soon.

 

I just discovered that the Dell Optiplex GX260 that I used in the first post was probably disabled due to this disk. I had not used this computer since the test. I went to use it and it would just freeze during boot. Nothing but a blank screen and a disk light locked on. I just reloaded the OS onto the disk with Norton Ghost and the system is running fine. So my advice is to backup the system before you use this disk.

Close Hauled