The other day I had a server that no one could access. It wasn’t actually being used or anything, but the company has been talking about using a server for a while, so it seemed to make sense to see if the one they had could actually be used. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks that way.
So I needed to get into it, but I had no way to do so. Back in the day, I would have used L0phtCrack, but since L0pht was purchased by At Stake, and then by Symantec, the costs have gone up a bit. A minimum of $450 for this? I don’t think so. The idea was to save money. So it’s off to the Internet.
I found this article that offered some options. I also read this article, which talks about recovering the password from a domain controller, which I suspect this was (I have since verified this to be the case). I don’t actually have easy access to a CD burner right at the moment, so I went first for the floppy-based solutions.
The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor seemed promising, even if it did involve writing data from a command prompt. I tried it out. Took me a while to get the SCSI stuff working. I eventually had to load the driver I needed onto a separate disk and load it manually – the auto-load feature didn’t work, and the manual feature didn’t work with too many items in the list. Once I could read the disk, I figured I was in business. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
So I moved on to XP Password Recovery. I didn’t really have high hopes, for one because the site was named XP Password Recovery (and not 2000 Password Recovery), and also because this is a domain controller. I wasn’t sure if it would work for this case. Nonetheless, the process was painless. I downloaded their image, created a disk, booted with it, it pulled the passwords into a text file which I uploaded. It immediately returned one character of the password. So I waited.
A while later, I received an email saying that the password had been cracked. I checked the web page, retrieved the password, and sure enough – it did the trick. Sweet.
Comments
6 responses to “Windows 2000 Password Recovery”
Long time ago , I confronted with the similar problem. Finally , my friend Jane introduce the Windows password Reset. It help me access windows. It’s worth a try!
The last link (idea) works fine. But password recovery will take 24 hours to e-mail the whole password.
I would suggest you follow the steps in one or more of the links above. Starting at the top of one would probably be good advice. If you can’t follow those instructions, then you probably don’t need to be doing this. Best of luck!
OK, so about this L0phtCrack5 thing… I need help on finding out the password that I forgot on the Windows 2000 workstation. It’s turned off and I cant even get past the password screen, cuz I don’t know the password! I need help desperately! How would I go about doing this? I read your article above but it has a lot of stuff and I don’t know where to start. Oh and I can get any program for the job! So please help me!
Yes indeed. That was fast! I’ve updated the link in my entry as well. Thanks for the comment!
I run that last service mentioned (the one that actually worked!) and would like to add that the URL has changed.
The old site doesn’t work anymore…