Many moons ago I used to make my own custom version of Ubuntu called Bauer-Puntu that had lots of useful tools already built in. One of the tools I would always install was an offline Windows password rest tool called chntpw.
I once made an awful how to video about using Bauer-Puntu and chntpw. You can watch it below:
The other day I was helping this really gorgeous cop I started dating reset the password on her laptop. Her ex-husband is kind of petty and changed her password just to piss her off. I went to use my trusty Bauer-Puntu USB drive, but the video drivers for it were out of date so it didn't work. Kind of a bummer...
Anyway, looking around I found out that someone made a dedicated live version of chntpw and it works like a charm! I tried it on a Windows 10 VM and it worked flawlessly!
From their page:
Chntpw (also known as Offline NT Password & Registry Editor) is a small Windows password removal utility that can run from a CD or USB drive. The latest version is 140201. Please download the Bootable CD image or the USB version for your own purpose:
- cd140201.zip (~18MB) – Bootable CD image. (md5sum: f274127bf8be9a7ed48b563fd951ae9e)
You can also download chntpw for ALT Linux, Arch Linux, CentOS / RHEL, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, ROSA, Slackware, Ubuntu distributions from this link.
- usb140201.zip (~18MB) – Files for USB install (md5sum: a60dbb91016d93ec5f11e64650394afb)
If you need to download the old version, please visit Offline NT Password & Registry Editor’s official website.
After you’ve downloaded it, you then need to burn chntpw to CD/USB drive in order to get it to work.If you've been looking for a way to easily hack errr... reset a local Windows password, this is it!
What do you like to use to do offline password resets for Windows? Let us know in the comments!