SAM file

[Max]

Hello,

We have a windows 2000 professional laptop which has a removable cd and
floppy drive, you can take out the cd drive and put in the floppy drive and
swap them about.

The problem is that the pc was setup without setting up the floppy drive,
therefore windows thinks it doesn't have one. The pc was then shipped off to
a user abroad and now every time she trys to put the floppy drive in it says
she doesn't have sufficient permissions to install this device.

OK so you might think just logon as admin and give her permissions or
install the drive - right well the person who built the laptop has left and
we cannot get the password for the admin account. I can see that the user
does have Power user rights which I thought would have been enough to
install this piece of hardware but obviously not.

So we either need to find some magical workaround to install the floppy
drive or find the admin password and up her rights to admin so that she can
install the drive. You have to remember this has to all be done over the
phone as she is remote, although I do have dial in access to the laptop
which means I can do limited tasks but the connection is very slow (less
than 15k) and I would only have the same user rights as the end user.

One idea we had was to copy the SAM file and then get her to email it to us
and we could crack it using lophtcrack or something, but everytime she tries
to copy the file it says it is in use as expected - is the SAM file in
c:\winnt\repair the same file copied? Could we use this?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

Max

 

[Steven L Umbach]

See the link below for possibilities. The second link is a free
administrator password reset program where there is a downloadable ISO image
that you can burn to make a bootable cdrom password reset disk for the built
in administrator account. However it is not a boot and finish disk. It
requires the user to answer to a number of prompts, most of which require
you to hit enter for the default selection. You may want to try it yourself
first and document the steps to coach her through the process. --- Steve

http://securityadmin.info/faq.asp#password
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

 

[Steven L Umbach]

You could try to crack the sam file also using the free program Cain and
Abel. I have not tried it for an offline sam file but see the link below for
details and you could tet it yourself. More than likely the password is
stored with lm hash which should be pretty easy to do. --- Steve

http://www.oxid.it/cain.html

 

[Max]

You could try to crack the sam file also using the free program Cain and
Abel. I have not tried it for an offline sam file but see the link below for
details and you could tet it yourself. More than likely the password is
stored with lm hash which should be pretty easy to do. --- Steve

http://www.oxid.it/cain.html

Cain and Abel looks good, its already cracked 10 of my passowrds including
my msn pasword and others, very impressive. Ill give it a go.

Thanks

Max