A mate of mine has forgotten there logon password for there laptop.

 

It is running vista and has no other accounts available to log onto.

 

Does anyone know how to reset the password or get into the laptop so that it can done.

 

I have spent all night downloading programmes that say they do it but to no avail.

 

This is obviously a touchy subject so perhaps people could email or PM an answer.

 

Cheers

 

Darrell

well when i done a course last year for Cisco ( which i hated and left) our teacher who was a bit dodgy told us to take the motherboard battery out. its fairly small. but if you place it in tin foil and in a freezer for so many hours it resets. something like that. he really did seem like he has stolen a few in his time ^^. wouldnt suggest it tho as risky. either that or re install vista ( pain i know) but aslong as he hasnt placed password on the bois where you have to enter a password just to load the system then he should be ok. ive done that before and i coudlnt even re-install windows.....

That is the CMOS/BIOS battery and will have nothing to do with Windows Vista

yes i am aware. however he reckoned it worked. ^^

i would think this works for BIOS password. after reading some web searches it seems you are right. i really am wondering why he said it now? he was south african and a little hard to understand for me. maybe he ment bios and i wasn't listening ( most likely) But then again i remember other students challenging him so im sure he did say it.

To my knowledge it can't work with vista. The password is software/OS based. The CMOS password is a different thing entirely. Vista can't access the cmos. If there isn't a seperate Admin account, unfortunately it means reinstalling vista which is a pain. Sometimes the admin log on is not visible when logging on...

Nah, that's for the power-on password.

 

I've never used vista, but presume it's similar to XP, in that you have to boot into Safe Mode and faff around at that level.

 

Alternatively, you are probably best off downloading one of the password fixing tools that will come one a Linux bootable CD. Have a shufti here for an example :-

 

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

Cheers guys.

 

Thanks Andy have tried that one.

 

Also should say that it is new machine so don't want to take the battery etc out.

 

It won't let me boot into sfe mode either as it still requires the password login.

 

Looks like it will be a trip to a shop to get it sorted.

 

Darrell

Try ringing microsoft on their helpline number for the UK. The re-install disc that should have come with the laptop should have had the number pre installed? I just bought a new Toshiba with Vista and when I used the disc it didnt even ask for the number. Sorry I dont spose that was much help but its all I have mate. :)

as a rule you cant do it. I mean, you can but with maximum buggering about. Its not that there is a default password - that would be pretty pointless. Like having a default key to car!

Youve got the remember that the operating system is made up of rules, no password no entry - so the only way to do it, is going to be somthing along the lines of use another PC to browse the hard disk, then run some sort of 3rd party application to remove the rules. (end of the day vista is just going to have a record of users and passwords somewhere which is just data, same as any other and there will be a utilitiy out there to rememdy it)

Alternativly, if you dont wish to remove hard disks, as Andy P suggested there will be some sort of linux based tool to do it. But you wont be able to do it from a logon screen (i very much doubt it anyway) nor will you be able to do it without alot of fecking about, its supposed to be secure!

 

And as the pillock who mentioned removing a password from an OS by removing the battery, he should be shot at dawn, stoned with old hardware, and shot some more. These south africans ;)

 

God knows what he means by freezing it... generally just removing it from the machine for 15 seconds or so (making sure its unplugged from the mains) does the trick... Not always the case tho with dell machines (some toshs possible as well) especially laptops - some of those have hard coded passwords from new, and are registered with the manufacturor. It is possible, to get a bios password for those out of dell etc, with alot of effort. an unlock code can be generated from a mixture of the current date, the manufactured date and also the serial number of the machine i believe it is.

Only alternative, if the Linux thing doesn't work, is to put the drive in another machine and use a cracker on the password file - if the disk isn't encrypted.

boot into safe mode, quite a lot of systems dont' set an admin password and you can log in as administrator with a blank password

 

ntpasswd should work though, if it doesn't post up the error messages and it should be easy to diagnose, the most common fault is that the system report a bad flag on the NTFS filesystem and mount read only, you can fix this by running scandisk