I am having a hard time recovering an old forgotten win2k Pro dell laptop pwd. I ran the live cd, created the ISO img, and set a dell inspiron 5000e bios to see cdROM 1st (top of que). The disk is a cd. Yet, the bootup continues to ignore the cd boot drive (although it flashes to acknowledge 1st), and always goes to hard drive prompting password. Also tried Peter Nordhal's approach. Same problem. Anyone with experience have any idea what's wrong? thanks.
Will your machine boot off a different bootable CD? my thought is perhaps you burned the ISO incorrectly and CD is not truely bootable... Just a thought - good luck
Sounds like you are either trying to boot off your HD, or the CD is not bootable. I would disable the HD in BIOS as a bootable device to ensure that you are attempting to boot off the CD and confirm that your BIOS boot order functionality is working properly. If you still don't boot, try another bootable CD, if you have one, to see if CD device is working properly. If other bootbable CD doesn't boot, you may want to swap out your CD device for a new one. I haven't tried this, but you might want to look into this alternatively: http://www.passwordunlocker.com
I think ophcrack is only for xp and vista. I was able to get Nordahl's to crack right after I posted. Wasted some disks, but I'm still not certain what I did incorrectly the first time. Maybe I burned the ISO image improperly at first, or downloaded a different version the 1st time. Had to have been something funny about the boot disk, as the boot up sequence would ignore and bypass it and go to the hard drive boot up every time; until I had the correct boot image burned. Thanks for the good suggestions, though. It was sweeet to get that stuff back. I highly recommend Peter Nordahl's free solution (google it) if anyone forgets a windows password.