Sometimes you loose your passwords on windows machines or happend to use old machines so rarely that you really can’t remember your passwords. This happened for my ALC-8500-2 Battery Charging IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop recently.
There is really nice tools for solving this quickly. I did mine like this. Fetch the Ophcrack tools from their site. I have cd-rom on that thinkpad so I used one of my old Vista 2.1.0 version of the disk I already had. You can fetch the latest live cd eg. XP 3.4 from here. Then I booted that live cd to text only and it started doing it’s stuff. I let the computer there for a while but It didn’t manage to broke the passwords I needed only some weak ones. Then I copied ophcrack.txt file via fat32 drive to usb-stick and to my main computer with some Intel Core i7 power. Then fetched ophcrack for win and installed that. Microsoft Security Essentials will alarm on suspicious program but you can leave that untouched as its trusted software. Then I also had to pull xp free small tables file.
Then just extract that package and configure Tables – XP free small and install. And then feeded from usb-stick that ophcrack.txt and after pressing Crack and some 3mins later I had the long lost passwords. If you are in a hurry, you can just choose the one line from that file what you really need.
