Peter's Blog

User has left and taken his Windows 2000 password with him. Great, I get to try resetting the password using knoppix. This is based on this with minor corrections and using Knoppix 4.0.

• Boot pc with knoppix
• Go to http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/chntpw and download the i386 version to the home directory
• Run

  alien --to-tgz chntpw_whatever
  tar xvfz chntpw-whatever.tgz
  mv ./usr/sbin/chntpw .
  

  which should leave a file called chntpw in the home directory. You may get warnings about not running these as root but they don't seem to matter. Use sudo if it bothers you.
• Run

  sudo vim /etc/fstab
  

  and change the fstab entry for your NTFS partition from ro to rw so you can write to it.
• Mount the ntfs partition, e.g.

  mount /mnt/hda1
  

• Go to the appropriate directory, e.g. for Windows 2000:

  cd /mnt/hda1/winnt/system32/config
  

  For Windows XP (which I haven't tried this on):

  cd /mnt/hda1/windows/system32/config
  

• List Windows 2000 user accounts:

  ~/chntpw -l SAM
  

• Reset password for a particular user:

  ~/chntpw -u username SAM
  

  when prompted, set the password to * as this will reset it. Trying to set a new password doesn't seem to work.
• Get out of the directory and unmount the partitions

  cd /
  umount /mnt/hda1
  

• reboot into windows

It took me three goes to get this to work, the above procedure succeeded. When it failed windows locked the account out completely which was disturbing. However, when I ran chntpw on the account it saw it was locked and offerred to unlock it which it succeeded in doing.

To compensate for potential security breeches from this, here is a security tip. If you are worried about security I would suggest locking your pc in a safe with the network disconnected.