Retrieve Your Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 admin password offline

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Have you ever forgotten yours Windows OS admin login password. Now you don’t have to reinstall the OS anymore. In one of the post, I had discussed about how to reveal Windows XP password? In this article I will explain how to retrieve admin password for various flavors of Windows operating system.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a local account on Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 PC. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.

It works offline, i.e., you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppydisk or CD or USB stick. It 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. NT stores its user information, including crypted versions of the passwords, in a file called ’sam’, usually found in \windows\system32\config.

Steps to retrieve Windows OS password:

Get the machine to boot from CD/USB stick (or floppy)
Floppy version need to swap floppy to load drivers.
Load drivers (usually automatic, but possible to run manual select)
Disk select, tell which disk contains the Windows system. Optionally you will have to load drivers.
PATH select, where on the disk is the system?
File select, which parts of registry to load, based on what you want to do.
Password reset or other registry edit.
Write back to disk (you will be asked)

The easiest & convenient way of using this utility is through USB stick.

To make a bootable USB drive:

Download the CD release.
Mount the download iso image using any virtual CD/DVD emulation.
Copy all files from the cd onto the USB drive. It cannot be in a subdirectory on the drive. You do not need delete files already on the drive.
Install the bootloader (you may have to be administrator). On the USB drive, there should now be a file “syslinux.exe”.
Run this from a command line,
```
d:\syslinux.exe -ma d: 
```
replace d with some other letter if your USB drive is on another drive letter than d: