title: Offline NT Password and Registry Editor link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/offline-nt-password-and-registry-editor/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 177 created: 2010/03/19 04:43:43 created_gmt: 2010/03/19 04:43:43 comment_status: open post_name: offline-nt-password-and-registry-editor status: publish post_type: post

Offline NT Password and Registry Editor

During the recent re-imaging of my company laptop with our firm standard XP image I ran into the usual difficulty that plagues former desktop engineers who no longer do desktop engineering — a perfectly good Ghost image of Windows XP that I didn’t have the admin password for.

Since leaving desktop work 9 years ago I had understandably not been kept in the loop on workstation administrative password changes.

The solution turned out to be quite simple, a bootable CD that included the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor. The .iso image found on the product web site is a stripped down Linux boot disk that includes the lastest fuse driver for reading and writing NTFS partitions. After downloading the .iso all you have to do is burn it to a blank CD and boot the target machine with it. The prompts to get you into the Password & Registry Editor are self-explanatory. The documentation and personal experience reveal that the most reliable way to deal with an unknown administrator password is to choose the option for simply blanking it out. Once the Win XP O/S comes back up after reboot you can then log in with an empty password.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo