PCA Forums

Dr. Memory here dragged an old system out from underneath the work bench to see if it still had all its parts and fired it up - this was a win2k/ME dual boot system where logging onto me is disabled on start up - and I can't remember what password I used on this system - I've cycled through all the usual ones i use but this was the kids puter and it was probably something clever like - nokidzhere - but i can't remember what it was - doh!

if i can find a floppy drive somewhere and install it I can probably get into the ME partitiion with a startup up disk, if i can do that, is there any way edit the passwords on the Win2k side? - the whole thing could probably benefit from being reloaded from scratch, but i really don't want to go through all that - TIA

Can you access the drive in DOS ? If so, you might be able to delete the "User" directory and then reboot and "add" a new user. <--- Just a wild guess.

That won't work in Win2k. Do a search in the OS forum. I remember a thread many many moons ago about deleting the Win2k password file to reset all the passwords. I remember it because i was thinking "Surely it can't be THIS easy to circumvent passwords."

found one that looks like it might work - just a brute force method works in fat32 only

boot into dos with a win9x boot diskette
go to winnt/system32

nuke all *.sam files or variants thereof

reboot in 2k

supposedly this flushes all the users/passwords and take you back to default

will report back later tonite

here's the MS link for making win2k boot disks if anyone is interested

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... us;Q197063

another triumph of microsoft security engineering :

all ya gotta do (with fat32 systems) is boot from a win9x startup disk - no cd option is fine

dos on down to [drive]:\winnt\system32\config

verify that file "sam" is present - delete sam

remove floppy and reboot

so is that deleting a file named "sam" or all the *.sam files ?

there was just one file named "sam"

Yold ya. Scary to think that the "next generation of NT operating systems" is this easy to defeat the password mechanisms, isn't it?

Gotta remember though, most systems running 2000 use NTFS. The whole point of NTFS is that its more secure, so if you can't do this with NTFS then its really not <i>that</i> big of a security issue.

that's right...no legit company uses FAT32...only NTFS for the additional security...so booting to DOS will do no good.

BUT, for home users this is a good save.


ok...i'll take part of that back....alot of places boot to a FAT partition, but then use NTFS on the remainder of the drive/array.

hmmmmm.

in my travels, i found quite few handy dandy progs that would deal with the problem under NTFS - the most elegant one was a little linux program that booted up and then cleaned out the sam file on the NTFS partition