Pupils changed my admin password

J

Jence

I am working as a science lab tech. In our dept. we got
some laptops with xp on it for students. On few machines
some of the students changed my admin password and put
some bad account name and set up new password. So that
laptops are unuseable. Do any body got any idea how i can
log on to the machine,
Thanks,
Jence
 
B

Ben M. Schorr, MVP-OneNote

I am working as a science lab tech. In our dept. we got some laptops
with xp on it for students. On few machines some of the students
changed my admin password and put some bad account name and set up new
password. So that laptops are unuseable. Do any body got any idea how i
can log on to the machine, Thanks, Jence

Get the new admin password from the students and change it to something
new. How did they get your admin password to begin with?
 
E

Esta Vida Nueva

I am working as a science lab tech. In our dept. we got
some laptops with xp on it for students. On few machines
some of the students changed my admin password and put
some bad account name and set up new password. So that
laptops are unuseable. Do any body got any idea how i can
log on to the machine,
Thanks,
Jence

Trial and error, ought to do it, but it would involve a *lot* of trial and
error.

If your school is happy to purchase NTFSDOS (your IT manager may already
have it, if you have 2000, NT Workstation, or XP machines around the
school) then you can copy the SAM file from a machine that has not been
screwed with, to the screwed machines.

How on earth did they get the admin password in the first place, I would
like to ask?
 
C

Colin Nash [MVP]

Perhaps the students used a similar tool :)


Esta Vida Nueva said:
Trial and error, ought to do it, but it would involve a *lot* of trial and
error.

If your school is happy to purchase NTFSDOS (your IT manager may already
have it, if you have 2000, NT Workstation, or XP machines around the
school) then you can copy the SAM file from a machine that has not been
screwed with, to the screwed machines.

How on earth did they get the admin password in the first place, I would
like to ask?
 
E

Esta Vida Nueva

Perhaps the students used a similar tool :)

Unlikely, you can get NTFSDOS for free, but it gives you read only root
access to the partition; so you can copy the SAM file and take it home and
use l0phtcrack to audit the passwords, but I dont think LC can audit and XP
SAM file, only and NT4 SAM file.

As for replacing the SAM file with "one I made earlier" you would need the
pay version of NTFSDOS, I dont think skewl kiddies are *that* desperate to
cause problems that they would pay for software only an IT manager would
ever have any real use for.

But that's only my opinion.
 
S

Steven L Umbach

They probably used a free downloadable program such as the one in the link below [it
does work on XP] if they can boot from any device other than the system hard drive.
Another possibility is that they installed a keyboard logging program on a computer
at one time. It is always best if possible to configure cmos to boot only from system
hard drive and password protect cmos settings along with using a locked case on
desktops and disable USB and other uneeded ports. A domain admin can also always gain
access to a domain computer as long as it still is in the domain [don't know if it
applies here]. --- Steve

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
 
C

Colin Nash [MVP]

There are other programs that can do it (for example, Linux has experimental
NTFS support that works pretty good)... and anyway its not that hard to
obtain the full version of NTFSDOS if you look around the net. (Remember
these are malicious kids trying to cause trouble-- software piracy won't be
a problem for them.)

You are right, 2k and XP use syskey which makes LC less useful... so
cracking is harder. Replacing or deleting it is just as easy.

(I'm not providing specific advice here, simply discussing a technical
matter so if anyone out there tries this and gets unexpected results you
have been warned!)
 

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