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Try Ophcrack. That will allow you to boot from a CD and crack the password on the fly. No fuss, no muss and it does work – at least for passwords that fall within the rainbow table parameters of 1 to 14 characters in length and composed of characters contained in this set:
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!"#$%&' ()*+,-./:;&<=>?@[]^_`{|}~ (including the space character)
If that doesn't work, a tool that's worked well for me is NTAccess which allows you to boot the system and reset the administrator password.
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More on this topic:
- Password Hardening Journal
One of the forgotten elements of a truly secure infrastructure is password security. If a hacker can break through your password defenses, he will have unchecked access to everything that an authorized user or even a network administrator has. Check out the pieces in this journal to find out how to secure your organization at this often overlooked password level.
- How to Bypass BIOS Passwords
BIOS passwords can be a liability if a user forgets his password. Here are a few tips and tricks that can help to bypass or reset the BIOS password on most systems.
- How to crack a password
In this tip find out how hackers exploit weaknesses so you know how to stop them
- NetBIOS Auditing Tool
Use this tool to crack passwords on Windows network shares
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