To be quite honest with you I don’t think any of these ideas are “legal” in the strictest terms. Running a Knoppix installation and changing the SAM database (my suggestion) most likely breaks 143 different Microsoft terms of service agreements. But my feelings on this matter is if a tool has only one legitimate use out of 10,000 illegal ones then it is still a very valid tool and should not be demonized.

One example that has been troubling me is Cain and Able. Every AV solution that I have tried from Norton to McAfee, determines Cain and Able to be either a virus or unwanted program. In the case of Norton, it deletes it every chance it gets. In many circles Cain has no use to exist at all and is only a hacker tool. I have to disagree. During the course of debugging a program I downloaded, I found Cain to be just the thing I needed. I got the latest version of GetRight, a common download manager. One of the websites that I was downloading from had basic password protection. GetRight of course has the ability to log into such sites but for some reason it was not working. I ended up using Cain to reveal the password that was hidden behind the security asterisks and to my amazement GetRight was not saving the password correctly. It was a bug in GetRight and I would have never found it without so called hacker tools.

The bottom line that I am getting at here is just about any piece of software can be used as a hacker tool, even notepad. Just about all hacker tools can be used for legitimate purposes. I know the TOS of Astahost says that there will be no hacker discussions but I feel that this is a very legitimate reason to “break out the big guns.” If you know in your heart that you are using this for good then use whatever mean you have to get back into your system.

Back to topic. Since you have no CD, floppy, USB, or network access I think you are pretty much stuck. In the situation I would have to run down to your local electronic store and either buy a portable CD player for a laptop or a converter that will allow you to hook up your laptop hard drive to a PC. Either way you may be out of some money. Even if you were to go to more advanced topics such as exploiting an escalation of private attack on Windows (what vhortex was talking about), there is no way to get the necessary files on the system. This also depends on the latest patch level of Windows and what service packs you have installed. I will go ahead and tell you that if you are not experienced in the ways of the dark side of the Internet, I would not even try this.

I am sorry that I was so long winded on this one but I was just wanting to explain my views on using “illegal” techniques. I hope this in itself does not violate the Astahost TOS, lol.

Same thing here, i don't intend to help cracking an administrator account, i mentioned a way to recover a broken system. But in this case i think this use can be legitimate.

This is like talking about security attacks with the intention of protecting our sites against those.



He, i'm tired of Norton automagically deleting my NetCat swissknife everytime i perform a virus scan. Because of that, i uninstalled Norton.

This post has been edited by DrK3055A: Oct 27 2006, 11:13 PM

i actually tried the 2nd one like a week ago, but when i type AT then enter it says access denied, error 5, and if i try to do it in safe mode it says the schedualing servce has not been started, i try to start it, but it says i must sing in as sdministrator to have access, to the shedualing thing

kinda stupid, but I was browsing thru the command


and I found out that you can actually delete the master account. That is completely retarded.

Smart move M$.

xboxrulz

Im not exactly sure if you ever got your computer to work again but my suggestion is log in as "Administrator". If you don't see it at first you need to restart you computer. When its booting up press F8 a few times. Then go to hard drive. Then log in on safe mode. This is a somewhat hack but you should see an administrator account unless you changed it, you shouldn't have a password for it. From there just log in and add your account back. Enjoy!
(opps I didn't see that this was 3 pages long please just deleat my post I didn't know that someone already suggested this. PLEASE don't ban me, please)

This post has been edited by sparkx: Oct 28 2006, 12:50 AM

Erm.. If you don't have a CD drive, how did you get your Windows Installation on your hard disk anyway?

Can you connect your laptop to another computer using a LAN cable or something? If you can, you can transfer some password cracking tools from that computer which has Internet access to your laptop.

Or you can follow the instructions on this website: http://www.petri.co.il/change_user_passwor...te_computer.htm

This post has been edited by ruijie: Dec 2 2006, 06:23 AM

I have an idea.

On the guest account, follow these EXACT steps:

1. Initiate a command prompt window.
2. Type at {exactly1minutepast} /interactive cmd.exe
Replace the italicized text with 1 minute after the current time of course.
3. Wait until the command window pops up and open task manager.
4. Kill the explorer.exe process.
5. In the command prompt, type explorer.exe.
6. Close the command prompt.
7. Open Control Panel.
8. Create an Administrator account.
9. Restart the computer.

Hope this works.

This post has been edited by FirefoxRocks: Dec 14 2006, 01:59 PM

Quite a bizarre scenario, just on this topic, if you are an administrator user and do not know the system administrator password you can reset the system administrator password through "control userpasswords2" menu, you just click on the administrator user and reset the password, but back to the problem.

You have a laptop with no CD/FDD. If you have a desktop computer that does have a CD drive and are willing to fork out some money which you can get refunded back, then what you'll need to purchase is a Laptop HDD (2.5") to Desktop HDD (3.5") adaptor, this will allow you to connect the laptop hard drive to a normal computer, make sure to keep the receipt if you want to return it.

You'll want to visit this site http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ and create the boot CD before you connect the laptop hard drive.

When you have the adaptor, connect the drive as master and that it gets detected in the BIOS correctly make sure that CDROM is the first device to be booted from and insert the Boot CD you created from that above site. Make sure you put the boot CD in, you don't want to boot from the drive or else additional hardware to support the new computer will be installed.

You'll boot from this disk FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY, it's not simple to understand, so what you want to do is BLANK the administrator password, be sure that at the end it WRITES to the hard drive, if done correctly that should be it, put the hard drive back into the laptop and you're done. The admin password is blank. If you feel there's no need to keep the adaptor, return it for a refund,

That's probably the way I would go about this, I've removed numerous Administrator passwords using similar methods and have had no problems with the boot CD used.

Cheers,

MC

The at command does not work in Guest mode or limited access users. He said so in a above post. you copied my elevate rights to System idea

the best idea that i have heard so far is to open up your laptop, break out the hdd (in a nice way of cause) and hook it up to a pc thats working (say the one your accessing astahost on) with some like a 2.5 to 3.5 hard drive adapter (like to such item below)
http://store.l-f-l.com/cgi-bin/cp-app.cgi?...CMP=BAC-nextagp

then boot up your pc, head over to the laptop hard drive, copy the files you want/need (my docs/movies/pictures etc) the format the drive!

since your laptop doesn't have a cd drive, install windows xp pro back onto the hard drive using the pc (install to the second (laptop) drive). only problem with that is then when you put the hard drive back into the laptop you will be asked to reactivate it because of the massive system changes (like a totally different computer!!) since you have no internet, you'll have to do it by phone!

and never let your friend use the laptop again!!! or at least give them a guest account! as you know first hand - a guest account cant do nothing!

good luck
-jimmy