Forgot your user account password? [XP, Vista, Win7]

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. I forgot how great and easy this tool is. I’ve used it dozens of times and today saved me big time on a client machine. Let me give you a scenario.

A home user buys a new computer and setups their own user account as the only administrator on the computer. Hours or days later forgot the password. How are they going going to get in? Wipe windows and reload it? Nah that takes to much time and money if your not familiar with the task. With this password and registry editor it can litterly take just a few minutes to either wipe out the password for a user account, promote another use to admin, or just change the password.

Overview

This is a utility to reset the password of any user that has a valid local account on your Windows system.
Supports all Windows from NT3.5 to Win7, also 64 bit and also the Server versions (like 2003 and 2008)
You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.
It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a CD or USB disk to do the password reset.
Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts!
There is also a registry editor and other registry utilities that works under linux/unix, and can be used for other things than password editing.

Why

Windows stores its user information, including crypted versions of the passwords, in a file called ‘sam’, usually found in windowssystem32config. This file is a part of the registry, in a binary format previously undocumented, and not easily accessible. But thanks to a German(?) named B.D, I’ve now made a program that understands the registry.

This site provides CD and floppy images for end users to easily edit their forgotten passwords. But it also provides full source code and binary builds of the tools to allow others to use as they like for other purposes. Registry format documentation also available.

Example

Below you can see all the user accounts and weather or not they are admin. For this example we typed in admin.

===== chntpw Edit User Info & Passwords ====

  | RID -|---------- Username ------------| Admin? |- Lock? --|
  | 03e8 | admin                          | ADMIN  |          |
  | 01f4 | Administrator                  | ADMIN  | dis/lock |
  | 03ec | grumf1                         |        |          |
  | 03ed | grumf2                         |        |          |
  | 03ee | grumf3                         |        |          |
  | 01f5 | Guest                          |        | dis/lock |
  | 03ea | jalla1                         | ADMIN  | *BLANK*  |
  | 03eb | jalla2                         |        | *BLANK*  |
  | 03e9 | petro                          | ADMIN  | *BLANK*  |

  Select: ! - quit, . - list users, 0x - User with RID (hex)
  or simply enter the username to change: [Administrator] admin

  RID     : 1000 [03e8]
  Username: admin
  fullname:
  comment :
  homedir :

  User is member of 1 groups:
  00000220 = Administrators (which has 4 members)

  Account bits: 0x0214 =
  [ ] Disabled        | [ ] Homedir req.    | [X] Passwd not req. |
  [ ] Temp. duplicate | [X] Normal account  | [ ] NMS account     |
  [ ] Domain trust ac | [ ] Wks trust act.  | [ ] Srv trust act   |
  [X] Pwd don't expir | [ ] Auto lockout    | [ ] (unknown 0x08)  |
  [ ] (unknown 0x10)  | [ ] (unknown 0x20)  | [ ] (unknown 0x40)  |

  Failed login count: 0, while max tries is: 0
  Total  login count: 3

Here you can see the options for each user account

 - - - - User Edit Menu:
   1 - Clear (blank) user password
   2 - Edit (set new) user password (careful with this on XP or Vista)
   3 - Promote user (make user an administrator)
  (4 - Unlock and enable user account) [seems unlocked already]
   q - Quit editing user, back to user select
  Select: [q] > 1
  Password cleared!