Posted: 4/11/2005 9:29:33 PM EDT
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My father in law bought a computer at a garage sale. The lady at the garage sale got it at an auction. The machine has Windows 2000 on it, but she did not know any of the passwords. Any way to get into the OS without formatting/etc? |
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Win2k has one of the better password schemes to come out of Microsoft. The very design of it is to prevent the password from being cracked. That being said, it can be done in two different ways. #1 is to purchase a password tool. They're a little pricey, but to find these Google "windows 2000 password recovery." The second is to scour the crack sites (search for something like "password crack" or "win2k password crack") but there are rules before you go visiting those sites: * don't use Internet Explorer * do use Firefox, Mozilla or Opera browsers * do use an updated antivirus program * there will be lots of strange pop-up windows and bad porn pics It's still not a sure thing and it's faster to simply reformat the drive and reinstall the OS. |
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There are boot disks available that will change the passwords on NT systems. I have used several with great success at recovring/changing passwords. That being said, be sure to read the instructions carefully. You don't want to corrupt any security data files. Bad things. Try these websites: home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm |