How To recover Admin Password for Windows Vista/XP - Part 2

Earlier we written about how to recover Admin Password using ERD Commander, Now here we writing about few more ways to do the same. There are several utilities and methods to recover Windows Password, among those we picked few best ones, so that now onwards you need not to worry as We have brought together several utilities which can recover Admin password for your Windows 7/Vista/XP box. They are discussed in details as given below -

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor –

This utility can be used to reset or set the password for any user for a local account on your Windows NT (or Windows 7/ XP/ Vista) based system. This utility will set password without using old password, and it can recover administrator users password as well. It does not work while you running your Windows so basically you have to boot from removable media (floppy Cd etc..) in order to run it, thus you will need to have access to Machine and to bios to change the boot order if required.

It can also unlock, disabled or locked user account along with resetting password and it can also work as Registry editor in Offline mode. So it comes real handy for manual removal of Trojan and Viruses, which are not being removed by your Anti virus, or which does not allow you to open Registry editor while windows is running.

Windows passwords are stored in system in encrypted form located in system32config directory. This file is also part of windows registry. But using Offline NT Password & Registry Editor we can edit this file as well as registry which is normally in Binary format.

To recover password, just download the iso file from above site, burn it to a cd and boot from it after which it will allow you to delete or reset password from the menu, and you are done. It is very easy and simple to use menu driven program.

Òphcrâck –

Ophcrack is based on rainbow table method and can actually crack your windows password and show them on screen, This can be used for hacking the system, but again like others you need to download ISO image of their bootable CD, burn it and boot your PC using this CD.  It comes with a GTK+ Graphical User Interface and runs on Windows, Mac OS X (Intel CPU) as well as on Linux. More details about it are given below -

Ophcrack Live CD

The ophcrack Live CD contains a small Linux system (SLAX6), ophcrack for Linux and rainbow tables which can recover most of alphanumeric passwords in few seconds. It actually decrypts the password and show them on screen instead of resetting or deleting them. It also works on Windows 7 / Vista with latest version. To use it Visit their site (mentioned above), choose correct Live CD version you need, download ISO File. Burn the ISO file to a CD and boot from CD.  Choose correct option from the menu and in few seconds it will show you the passwords.

The Only disadvantage of this program is you have to download a relatively large ISO file (about 400MB), and some of Anti virus flags it as malware because of it’s ability to actually show passwords.

SAMInside –

SAMInside is a very powerful Windows password recovery tool but it is not free, but using demo version you can recover your password with some limitation. basically if you need to recover password for only one machine then probably you can use it for with limitations mentioned on home page given above.

SAMInside - Powerful Tool to Recover Windows Password

SAMInside can import SAM and System registry files and can recover password, it can also recover password from these files even if they are encrypted with additional syskey. It also have several other feature which makes it most powerful Windows password recovery program. Full version of SAMInside can literally recover password for any version of windows with almost any kind of encryption used in password storage. So if you need a professional Password recovery program this is the best choice.

Kon-Boot–

It is a free utility which was basically designed to login some Linux distribution without knowing the root password or elevate any user to have root privileges. But Now the days you can use it with windows as well. It works great with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Even with windows Server 2008 version.

Kon-Boot Bypasses authentication check during boot and you can login to any local user account without validating or entering the password for same. so once you are logged in as Administrator user of the machine you can change the password for any user including yourself. Kon-Boot is available as Bootable Floppy and CD image on above mentioned site, and you can also create a USB boot media with Kon-Boot in it by using Unetbootin.

Cain & Abel –

In Hebrew Bible Cain & Abel, were the son and daughter of Adam and Eve, but here we talking about the password decrypter for windows. Cain & Abel  not only recover Windows password but it can work with various other passwords and can sniff network data and can be used as decrypter as well. It can use dictionary, Brute force attack or cryptanalysis algorithm to decrypt password.

Cain & Abel need you to login to windows with administrator privilege, so you can recover password for any other account once you login to windows using any Administrator Account. This is not a Recover Windows password tool to use if you have forgotten the admin password for windows and unable to login to windows system as administrator. This is also not very easy to use as it was basically designed as decrypter, some advanced knowledge of computers is required in order to use Cain & Abel.

LCP –

It is another tool which can recover windows password for free, Just like Cain & Abel. You need to have access to at least one Admin account  on the machine for which you need to recover Forgotten Admin Password. LCP Is also a bit complex program just like previous one and you must have some basic cum advanced windows knowledge in order to use it. It Also uses combination of password retrieval methods including Brute force, and Dictionary attacks.

John The Ripper —

John the Ripper is also a free tool, it was also developed for some version of Unix initially and now can work on 15 different platforms including win 32. It is one of most popular software among Unix working group for Password breaking. John the Ripper itself is a free tool but you may need to pay for the word list which is used to break the password, though you can find the wordlist for free as well. That is why It still categorized as free tool.

John the Ripper - Popular Free Tool to Recover Windows Password

It contains a several password breaking techniques into single software. It can be used against encrypted passwords, MD5, DES, Kerberos, Blowfish, Windows LM Hash, MD4, LDAP and even MySQL Password. It can also use dictionary attack and brute force technique. You must be an advanced user to use it as it is a command line based program and requires knowledge of basic windows/UNIX command in order to use it.

Hope you will like this story as well, if you want any tutorial related to any software, just leave a comment and we will bring what you want to see. If you like this story please share your opinion with us.

Also if you can not find these tools useful and looking for something which is very easy to use and can work for you, you can consider looking at - Password Resetter – Reset your Windows Password in 3 steps!   

Click Here! to open the site in new window and look for it yourself.