Forgotten password for vista laptop.

[SaviorSelf]

As the title says. Friend found a laptop he'd used at one point and wanted to look through some of the files on there. Booted it up and he can't remember the password for the life of him. Looking for a way to either get the password, or reset it somehow; anyone have any advice?

Windows Vista Home Premium, 32-bit, HP dv9500.

[Gippo]

trinity rescue is always in my toolkit.

http://www.walkernews.net/2007/08/26...ount-password/

[SaviorSelf]

How do you burn an ISO? Can he boot from a flash drive?

[Neogearzx]

the simplest way to burn an iso is shown here
http://www.hiren.info/pages/how-to-burn-iso

Text and pic for the lazy / scared to click a .info link

How to Burn a ISO Image
You will need:
(1) A ISO Image you wish to burn to CD
(2) A Blank CD or a Blank DVD
(3) Download BurnCDCC.zip (68KB) [ http://www.hiren.info/download/freeware/BurnCDCC.zip ]

Step 1

Start BurnCDCC.exe

Step 2

Click on Browse and choose your iso image

http://www.hiren.info/images/burncdcc.gif

Now choose your Burner and click on finalize now set the Speed to 32X and click on Start

[Ghostsix.Midgard]

Active password changer professional

[Kriz]

Ophcrack Live CD Vista edition

Recover, not resets, the password (provided it's not some 14 character long, symbol laded monstrosity).

Also, fun to run for the lulz.

[SaviorSelf]

Ophcrack Live CD Vista edition

Recover, not resets, the password (provided it's not some 14 character long, symbol laded monstrosity).

Also, fun to run for the lulz.

Ophcrack is what I found before but not sure where to get it. Have any links?

[Kriz]

Ophcrack is what I found before but not sure where to get it. Have any links?

http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/down...hp?type=livecd

Vista CD -> self boots and runs -> maybe you get the pw cracked (usually)

[SaviorSelf]

Ophcrack didn't work. :/

[Gippo]

then use trinity rescue

[SaviorSelf]

Got a disk error multiple times when trying to burn it, dunno.

[bungiefan]

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

I keep a copy of that in my tool kit for working on computers. It doesn't work on Windows 7, but it seems to on Vista and anything earlier. It just clears the password, so as long as none of the files on the drive have been encrypted (which is rarely used by home users anyway), it will grant you access and let you create a new password on login. It's fine for people getting locked out of their own computer, but is pretty obvious if you need to get in undected, and OPHCrack is much better for that sort of thing.

[Killgannon]

failing the password breakers, theres always the nice manual way, but you would need a live linux distro to pull it off... like here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9J6HHO9Xc