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Today I could not login to my Vista machine. After sometime it boiled down to two choices:
1) Reinstall Vista and lose all data.
2) Reset my account password.
I decided to go with option #2. After some googling I found a lot of people mentioned using a freeware software called Ophcrack . This did not work for me as I got stuck on the following error:
All Lm hashes are empty, please use NThash tables to crack the remaining hashes
Apparently a lot of people have the same problem. To solve it you need to get tables that will cost you $240 .
Thats when I found about a product called Offline NT Password And Registry Editor .
This worked like a charm. Even though it has NT in its name, it is compatible with Vista. To run it you need to follow the outlined steps:
STEPS TO RECOVER FROM A LOST PASSWORD ON WINDOWS VISTA:
1) Download the software from here . If the download file location changes just visit the site and download directly.
2) Unzip the file. You should get an ISO image file.
3) Burn the ISO image file to CD. You will have to burn it as an image. If you don't know how to burn it as an image here are the instructions:
3 a) Download the free Easy CD DVD Burner .
3 b) Even though its free it will want to install the yahoo tool bar and such. You can uncheck those options.
3 c) When the software comes up click on the Copy CD/DVD button on the tool bar at the top.
3 d) Under the Action menu on the left, click the Burn an image file link. Choose the unzipped ISO file and press OK. Once the CD is ready it will eject.
4) Take the CD and put it in your Vista machine. Restart the machine and boot it from the CD. Every machine is different but usually when the machine is coming up it will tell you how to change your boot options. On my machine it was F12.
5) After that just follow the screen instructions. Be sure to have this page up on a separate machine.
I used the default options after that and was able to reset my password to blank. The only problem I had was that my machine had two partitions. The first one did not have my passwords. So I had to rerun the program with the second partition.
All in all it took 15 minutes including the burning of the CD. Once the pwd was reset to blank, I just started the machine normally and went straight to my account.
The software maker claims that it works on XP, NT, and other versions of windows, but I did not verify that.
Good Luck!
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