Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk / CD
I’ve put together a single floppy or CD which contains things needed to edit the passwords on most systems. The CD can also be installed on a USB drive, see readme.txt on the CD.
The bootdisk should support most of the more usual disk controllers, and it should auto-load most of them. Both PS/2 and USB keyboard supported.
Tested on: NT 3.51, NT 4 (all versions and SPs), Windows 2000 (all versions & SPs), Windows XP (all versions, also SP2 and SP3), Windows Server 2003 (all SPs), Vindows Vista 32 and 64 bit (SP1 also), Window 7 (all variants). Some say also Windows Server 2008 is OK.
Be careful
If used on users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or Vista, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless you remember the old password again If you don’t know if you have encrypted files or not, you most likely don’t have them. (except maybe on corporate systems)
How to use?
Please read the FAQ
If you have the CD, all drivers are included.
If you use the floppy, you need one or more of the driver floppies, too.
Overview
- Get the machine to boot from CD (or floppy)
- Floppy version need to swap floppy to load drivers.
- Load drivers (usually automatic, but possible to run manual select)
- Disk select, tell which disk contains the Windows system. Optionally you will have to load drivers.
- PATH select, where on the disk is the system?
- File select, which parts of registry to load, based on what you want to do.
- Password reset or other registry edit.
- Write back to disk (you will be asked)
Download – iso CD image
How to make the CD
Unzipped, there should be an ISO image file (cd??????.iso). This can be burned to CD using whatever burner program you like, most support writing ISO-images. Often double-clikcing on it in explorer will pop up the program offering to write the image to CD. Once written the CD should only contain some files like “initrd.gz”, “vmlinuz” and some others. If it contains the image file “cd??????.iso” you didn’t burn the image but instead added the file to a CD. I cannot help with this, please consult you CD-software manual or friends.
The CD will boot with most BIOSes, see your manual on how to set it to boot from CD. Some will auto-boot when a CD is in the drive, some others will show a boot-menu when you press ESC or F10/F12 when it probes the disks, some may need to have the boot order adjusted in setup.
How to make the floppy image
The unzipped image (bdxxxxxx.bin) is a block-to-block representation of the actual floppy, and the file cannot simply be copied to the floppy. Special tools must be used to write it block by block.
- Unzip the bd zip file to a folder of your choice.
- There should be 3 files: bdxxxxxx.bin (the floppy image) and rawrite2.exe (the image writing program), and install.bat which uses rawrite2 to write the .bin file to floppy.
- Insert a floppy in drive A: NOTE: It will lose all previous data!
- Run (doubleclick) install.bat and follow the on-screen instructions.
- Thanks to Christopher Geoghegan for the install.bat file (some of it ripped from memtest86 however)
Or from unix:
dd if=bd??????.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k
How to make and use the drivers floppy
- Simply copy the zip file onto an empty floppy.
- You MUST NOT UNZIP THE ZIP FILE!
- Depending on your hardware you may only need one of the driver sets or the other, or maybe both.
- To use, insert one of the driver floppies when asked for it after booting, the zip file will be unzipped to memory.
- If no drivers matched (no harddisk found), you can select ‘f’ from the main menu to load the other driver set.
- Then select ‘d’ to auto-start the new drivers (if it matches your hardware)
- Sometimes it fails detecting the floppy change and you get an error, just select ‘f’ again, it works the second time.
- For more advanced users that uses this often, it is possible to unzip just the drivers you need and zip them up into a new zip archive. The zip file name must start with “drivers”, the rest is ignored. (it unzips drivers*.zip)
To make a bootable USB drive / key:
1. Copy all files from this CD onto the USB drive.
It cannot be in a subdirectory on the drive.
You do not need delete files already on the drive.
2. Install the bootloader (you may have to be administrator)
On the USB drive, there should now be a file “syslinux.exe”.
Run this from a command line, like this:
j:\syslinux.exe -ma j:
replace j with some other letter if your USB drive is on another
drive letter than j:
On some drives, you may have to omit the -ma option if you
get an error.
If it says nothing, it probably did install the bootloader.
Please note that you may have to adjust settings in your computers BIOS
setup to boot from USB.
Also, some BIOS (often older machines) simply won’t boot from USB anyway.
Unfortunately, there are extremely many different versions of BIOS,
and a lot of them are rather buggy when it comes to booting off different
media, so I am unable to help you.
