A co-worker of mine forgot the password for her netbook and brought it to me. I’d never recovered a password on a Windows machine but I know there are tools out there for doing it. With a little Google searching I found a method using the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor tool. It doesn’t actually recover the password but it allows you to re-assign a password or just clear it. In this post we’ll just clear it.
Hardware:
- Any Windows 7 computer (in this specific case, an HP Mini)
Software:
- Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (ONTP&RE)
How To Reset the Password on a HP Mini Running Windows 7
Step 1: Create a Boot Disk of the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.
I burnt a CD but you can also go the USB method, but the CD version is easier because you can just straight out burn an iso file (and I did this on my Mac and it’s a PC program but iso’s are iso’s). Download a zipped version of the iso file. Burn this to a CD. On a Mac it’s real easy: Simply put a blank CD in your Superdrive, run Disk Utility (in the “Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities” folder), click burn (in Disk Utility), in the window that pops up browse to the .iso file you just unzipped and select the file, burn the CD, piece of cake.
Step 2: Boot off the ONTP&RE CD.
On this HP Mini you need to press Escape (ESC) while it is first booting up to get to the startup Menu. This is what it will show:
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| Boot (startup) menu on the HP Mini |
Press F9 for “Boot Device Options.” Select the CD (or DVD) drive from the options and press ENTER to select it. In this case, the HP Mini doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive so I used my externally enclosed Superdrive (listed as MATSHITAVD-R UJ-8A8):
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| Boot Manager on HP Mini |
Once you’ve selected the CD drive it will load the ONTP&RE software.
Step 3: Press ENTER at the “boot:” command line.
Once you select your CD drive as the boot drive it will come up to the screen below. If you wait for long it will automatically boot and run through a bunch of different screens of info (too fast to read). Press ENTER to continue (if it hasn’t already:
Step 4: Select the Boot Partition of Windows 7.
In this case it is NOT the (default) Boot partition (listed as choice 1) but is number 2 (the largest partition). This is the place where the online tutorials for this software will fail you because the HP Mini is set up differently than most computers are by default. HP puts a bunch of software recovery and restore stuff on extra partitions. Type 2 and then press ENTER.
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| Select the partition where Windows 7 is located |
Step 5: Enter the path to the registry directory.
It will be the default so you can just press ENTER.
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| Select the default path and registry files |
Step 6: Select which part of registry to load.
You want to just do a “Password reset” (choice number 1). This is the default choice so simply press ENTER.
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| Choose Password Reset |
Step 7: Choose Password or registry edit.
You want to “Edit user data and passwords,” the default choice so simply press ENTER.
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| Choose Edit user data and passwords |
Step 8: Enter the username you want to reset the password for.
You should see a list of the usernames on the machine. It says something about entering the hex number for the username (listed by each one) but I just typed in the username.
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| Enter the username you wish to reset the password |
Step 9: Tell the software to clear the password.
Type 1 and then press ENTER to clear the password for the username you entered in step 8. You should get the message, “Password cleared!” Repeat steps 8 and 9 to clear the passwords for all the usernames you want.
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| Enter 1 to Clear/Blank the password |
Step 10: Begin to exit out of ONTP&RE.
Type ! and then ENTER. Then type q and then ENTER.
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| Enter q to quit |
Step 11: Write files to drive.
I don’t know if this step must be done for clearing the password but I did it anyway. It will then ask you “About to write file(s) back! Do it? [n]”
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| Write the changes to file |
Enter y and then press ENTER. If it was successful it will say:
************ EDIT COMPLETE **********
Press ENTER again to tell it you do NOT want a “New Run.”
Step 12: Reboot.
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot the computer. It should boot up right into windows and log you in without asking for any password.
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| Enter Cntrl-Alt-Del to reboot |
The CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys:
Successfully logging into Windows 7 without a password (now):
Success:
Resources:
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