If you forget windows password, its not easy to reset it. if you dont know the propper tool which can do this. Most of the peoples are using ERD Disk for this. Its working fine upto windows xp, But when they came across windows vista/7 it wont work. So here most of the blogs will suggest to work with sam file (SAM is the file that contains your Windows registry). Its present in directory "WINDOWS/system32/config/". Using linux command chntpw on an Linux live disk we can change the settings. like this,
sudo chntpw –u <username> SAM
Some other similar kind of bootable stuff's are also available for the same. But in-case if you don't have any one of these stuff or you are not getting it working for you, Now if you can access the windows file system. Then you can still change it. Just applying a simple trick and its all done.
What we have to do is we have to found the window functions which can execute on login screen. lucklly we have a sticky key function, i.e. hitting shift key for 5 times and a popup will come. We know password for any user can be change from command line also.So I think you got me. Exactly we are going to interchange these functions. All these functions are controlled from some files. So if we will interchange the name of files it will work for us. here
Command line the file is: cmd.exe
Sticky key file is: sethc.exe
Both are present in "\windows\system32" directory. so we just need to take the backup of sethc.exe file. this thing can be done from Windows installation disk as well as Linux live disk.
So first go with Windows installation disk:
1. Boot off the Windows disk and select the "Repair your computer" option.
2. Find the option to open the Command Prompt and select it.
3. take the back of stiky file as
copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\
4. Replace the stiky file with command prompt file as
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
5. Reboot your system and on login screen hit shift key 5 times, a command prompt will open in administrator mode.
6. using "net user" command you will get user list present in your system.
7. Now time to change the password as:
net user <username> <password>
Once it says command completed successfully its done.
Now you can log in to your windows System. using your password.
Here you probably want to put back the original sethe.exe file. So you can reboot your system from Windows installation disk and go through step 1 & 2 to get command prompt. and execute the commend
copy c:\sethc.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exeSame thing can be done from linux environment also, Only you need to get this windows directory.
