Knoppix is coool!! What makes it amazing to me is the way I can use it to troubleshoot my friends’ Windows systems. It is much, much better than most Windows recovery tools given the fact that most of them are command line-based. Now consider this… You have a PC running Windows 2000/NT/XP. You have an ‘Administrator’ account and a normal user account. Let’s say, for some reason, you forgot the passwords for both accounts. (Well, I know that it is less likely to happen). This is just one of the situations where the magic ofKnoppix comes into play.
What I did
The following steps are based on this article.
- I first downloaded this tool called chntpw.
- Next, I booted from the Knoppix CD.
- I then installed chntpw in the home folder.
- After that I edited fstab to mount the Windows partition read-write by including rw in the mount options and remounted the partition. (This step is required only if the partition in which Windows is installed is an NTFS partition).
- And then, I entered the %SystemRoot%\Windows\system32\config directory.
- Finally, I executed the command – chntpw -u <username> SAM
O Knoppix…Great is thy power…
