I was looking to see if i could find my previous posts about deleting or editing passwords on windows operating systems. I couldnt .. So i figured I would make a thread so others who may need this resource can find it.

All you need to do this is physical access to the machine.

Windows Password Editor <--- is the link to the page where you can download to files to create a password editing disk. I also reccomend you print out the instructions so you can follow the onscreen commands as they happen.

You can make it with a cd/dvd/floppy. The only thing is that if you do erase the password on a user account .. it can not be put back ... (unless you knew what it was or are told after and you put the password back in place) and that anything that has been encrypted in that user account will no longer be accessable ... ever. Even if you know the password those encrypted files will be non useable.

1. make your cd/dvd/floppy disk
2. put it in the proper drive (depending on media type)
3. if you made a dvd/cd make sure the boot sequence is dvd/cd first then floppy then hard drive.
4. Reboot the PC and boot to whatever media type you used.. the password editor is a boot disk .. so you must boot it up before windows takes over
5. follow the onscreen instructions in the DOS/SHELL command window and use the printed instructions to understand what to input as you follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Erase the password
7. remove password editing media and reboot the PC.
8 Login to that previously locked user account.

I have personally used this ... and it works great on all windows operating systems.

MNG

awesome advice!! thanks for posting it!

Woots! .. The seal of approval from ML herself! Hopefully it will help someone. But also in the wrong hands its very powerful. But i guess that goes with any snooping tools.

I wanted to ad also that (after going to the site again) you can also put this tool on a USB memory stick and use your USB memory stick to boot your PC with (something I am not familiar with).

Some (I would venture to say most) newer bios revisions recognize USB drives as external drives allowing you to boot off of them.

CV

Topping because it is very useful ...

This does work. I had forgotten the password of one of my virtual machines, so I booted it from one of these password editing disks. About a minute later, I was back in.

Now I knew I didn't have any encrypted files, nor did I need to worry about someone knowing I broke in.

If you can successfully promote another user on that machine to admin rights, that may be better as you leave no indication that you've accessed the users account.

If you have more time, and some money, you can make a copy of the hard drive to another drive the same size or longer with many readily available utility disks and then peruse the contents at your leisure without the other person knowing.

Purchase a hard drive, a USB hard drive adapter and make a CloneZilla Bootable cd ( http://clonezilla.org/ ) and you can take a snapshot of the suspects computer and poke around to your hearts content of what her/his disk looked like on the day you took your copy.

You don't even need to open the case to do this.

You could probably also purchase one of the many portable hard drives and do the same with CloneZilla.

This may be more useful for the snooping phase when you don't want to let your suspect know you are watching what she's doing.

BUMP ... thought it might be useful for some of the newly betrayed spouses looking to gather info.