Recover Forgotten User Passwords In Windows With Ophcrack

Have you ever forgotten your password in Windows and then did not know how to get it back so you were then locked out of your computer? Well there is a very simple solution to this problem and it is called Ophcrack. Ophcrack is a utility that you boot your computer into and it then uses Rainbow Tables to find the passwords.

First to recover your passwords you will need to download Ophcrack it can be found here: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/download.php?type=livecd. When it is finished downloading it will have a .iso file extension. What this means is that it is a file that is used to be written to a disc or mounted to a virtual CD/DVD drive. You will want to burn the file to a disc.

To burn the file you can use a program called ImgBurn and can be downloaded from here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_imgburn/.

Once you have Ophcrack burned to a disc you will then need to restart your computer and set your Bios settings to boot from a CD/DVD first. If you don't know how to do this you can read more on the subject Here.

After you have set it to boot from a disc you will need to have your Ophcrack disc in the CD/DVD drive. When it is booting from the disc you should see a screen similar to the one shown below.

Ophcrack Live CD Boot Screen

When you see this screen you will want to select Ophcrack Graphic Mode. It will then load and boot into the disc. Once Ophcrack has booted completely it will start to find your passwords. This may take a couple minutes to do depending on how long and complex your passwords are.

Ophcrack finding passwords

You can click stop once you have found the password for the account that you can't remember. Now all that you will have to do is just restart your computer by clicking Exit. You will then be asked in the teminal to Press any key to exit. Then push any key and you will then be asked if you would like to Shutdown (Y/N). You will want to hit Y then push enter.

Shutdown (y/n)?

Now just boot back into Windows and enter in your lost password. Now if you ever forget your password again you can just use this little tool to help you out.