HOW TO RECOVER WINDOWS ADMINISTRATOR PASSWORD

Sometimes when you are not a frequent user of a machine, it may happen that you forget the login details of a computer. If you forget the administrator password and don’t have a password reset disk or another administrator account, you won’t be able to reset the password. If there are no other user accounts on the computer, you won’t be able to log on to Windows and will need to re-install Windows.(Sources: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/What-to-do-if-you-forget-your-Windows-password). This is what Microsoft says, but fortunately for us , that is not true. There are many password recovery tools available on internet that can help you recover the lost password in minutes. Out of that one free to download open source software is Ophcrack. Follow the steps:

1. Download the Ophcrack LiveCD image from http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/. If you are using Windows 7, download the “Vista” version.

2. Burn the image on a CD/DVD.

3. To recover the log-in password, place the CD in drive and reboot your system. While booting choose to boot from CD (In case you do not know how to boot from cd, as it starts booting start pressing F2 or F12 to go to boot options. There choose the option “boot from cd”).

4. The LiveCD will be booted and it will recover all the users and their corresponding passwords, in minutes.

This is the best software to recover passwords even if you don’t know the ABCD of the complex password recovery process. You can also use it to hack into the systems of your friends (or your lab’s administrator account ).