My sisters co-worker has a computer problem caused by her 20 yo son. Apparently her son changed the admin password on her XP box ,for fun, and now has forgoten the damn password. I'm going over to her house tonight and wanted some suggestions from anyone here good at cracking. I did some search on-line and LC5, John the Ripper and SAMinside were mentioned.

I think the kid can log in to his account, so I'm gonna try to log into his account in safe mode and see if I can do a system restore to a date before he changed the password.

Any thoughts...

kick the kids a$$

Back in the day, you could recover it by using Windows2k boot discs, but i think MS fixed that w/ one of the SP's.

Are their other accts on the box? If it does, then just use the other account to change the admin pswd. If it does not, or is a limited acct, how did he chg the admin pswd in the first place?

Start it up in safe mode (I think it is F5 when you are booting up) then when you get into safe mode you should be able to change the pasword.

Jon

This might work:
http://www.break.com/index/how_to_hack_windows_xp.html

Check this out http://my.break.com/media/view.aspx?ContentID=195241 ahh was posted already

there used to be a chip, on the mother board that you could remove and then put back in and it would reset. I thought it was in the manuals what chip it was.

Theres a jumper on the motherboard you remove to reset the BIOS password. It won't do anything for the operating systems login password.