I am the administrator for a small office, but I do not seem to be able to find information on the computers I am supposed to be administrating. Example: an employee left abruptly and we need to check his office email for unfinished work he may have not told us about. But I am unable to find his password to logon. Can you help?

There are several ways to get into a computer that is locked by a password - one requires a little more work, but it's free while the others are easy but will cost a little bit of money.

Windows XP Security Hole

If you are using Windows XP and you have the CD, you can use a built-in security hole that will let you reset the password. Follow these steps exactly and pay attention to step number 7:

1. Put the Windows XP CD in the disk drive and make sure the computer is set to boot from CD first. If not, you may have to change the boot order in the BIOS.
2. When you see the Welcome screen, press Enter.
3. Accept the licensing agreement by pressing F8.
4. Select the XP installation you need (there will probably only be one) and press R to being the repair process.
5. Now you let it run. If your computer asks you to press a key to reboot from CD, don't press one. Let it reboot on its own.
6. You will see a highlighted message that the system is installing Windows.
7. Now you need to watch the lower left hand corner of the screen carefully - you will see "Installing Devices" - immediately press Shift+F10. This is the security hole.
8. You will see a command console open. When you see the prompt, type in: NUSRMGR.CPL and press Enter.
9. You should now have access to the User Accounts on the control panel. You can get in here and change any passwords that you need to.
10. If you don't want a password on this machine, type in: control userpasswword2 at the prompt and you won't be asked for one when you log in.
11. Exit out of the command box and let the repair continue to run.
12. To complete the repair you will need to enter the product key that came with the CD. You should then be able to log in using the new password you created (or using none at all if that's how you set it up). All the data and programs will remain intact.

However, since you need to check his e-mail, if his e-mail account is password protected, you may need to crack that software as well.

Password Reset Software

If you don't have the Windows CD or you don't want to go to the trouble of doing the repair, there are many downloadable options for cracking a password. Most of these will either recover an encrypted password or remove it from the system entirely so that you can start fresh. There are so many of these on the web these days it is hard to recommend one, but two to try are Office Password Recovery Software (for recovering passwords for Microsoft Office products like Excel, Outlook, and Word) and Password Changer .

These tools should let you access a company computer. Please let us know if you need any further help.

Kat Delong | June 11th, 2009
Tags: password cracking, password software, terminated employee
Categories: Security

You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.