How many times has it happened to you that you just finished setting up a system, changed the password and BAM!  You can’t remember the password that you typed in.  You cannot access the system, and you don’t want to spend another 2 or 3 hours setting up Windows again.  There is a utility to reset the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your NT system including Windows Vista.

    * You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.
    * It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a CD.
    * Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled user accounts!

NOTE THAT THE BOOTDISK CONTAINS CRYPTHOGRAPHIC CODE, and that it may be ILLEGAL to RE-EXPORT it from your country.

THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. THE AUTHOR IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE (MIS)USE OF THIS SOFTWARE!

Download

CD Image – Bootable CD image – can also be burned onto a USB drive or key

How to make the CD

Unzip the file and there will be an ISO image file (cd070927.iso). This can be burned to CD using whichever CD Burning program you like, Nero is my recommendation.

The CD will boot with most BIOSes, see your manual on how to set it to boot from CD.

The chntpw binary is (c) 2004 Petter N Hagen.  Please see COPYING.txt The distribution of the floppy image is restricted by this if it contains that binary.

INSTRUCTIONS

Boot from the CD.
You will see the following screen begin to load;  Hit Enter when you see boo