If you can’t log in even after trying your twelve passwords, or you’ve inherited a computer complete with password-protected profiles, worry not – you don’t have to do a fresh install of Windows. We’ll show you how to change or reset your Windows password from a Ubuntu Live CD.

This method works for all of the NT-based version of Windows – anything from Windows 2000 and later, basically. And yes, that includes Windows 7.

You’ll need a Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD, or a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive. If you don’t have one, or have forgotten how to boot from the flash drive, check out our article on creating a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 flash drive.

The program that lets us manipulate Windows passwords is called chntpw. The steps to install it are different in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu.

Installation: 32-bit

Open up Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System at the top of the screen, expanding the Administration section, and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager.

chntpw is found in the universe repository. Repositories are a way for Ubuntu to group software together so that users are able to choose if they want to use only completely open source software maintained by Ubuntu developers, or branch out and use software with different licenses and maintainers.

To enable software from the universe repository, click on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic window.

Add a checkmark beside the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)” and then click close.

When you change the repositories you are selecting software from, you have to reload the list of available software. In the main Synaptic window, click on the Reload button.

The software lists will be downloaded.

Once downloaded, Synaptic must rebuild its search index. The label over the text field by the Search button will read “Rebuilding search index.” When it reads “Quick search,” type chntpw in the text field. The package will show up in the list.

Click on the checkbox near the chntpw name. Click on Mark for Installation.

chntpw won’t actually be installed until you apply the changes you’ve made, so click on the Apply button in the Synaptic window now.

You will be prompted to accept the changes. Click Apply.

The changes should be applied quickly. When they’re done, click Close.

chntpw is now installed! You can close Synaptic Package Manager. Skip to the section titled Using chntpw to reset your password.

Installation: 64-bit

The version of chntpw available in Ubuntu’s universe repository will not work properly on a 64-bit machine. Fortunately, a patched version exists in Debian’s Unstable branch, so let’s download it from there and install it manually.

Open Firefox. Whether it’s your preferred browser or not, it’s very readily accessible in the Ubuntu Live CD environment, so it will be the easiest to use. There’s a shortcut to Firefox in the top panel.

Navigate to http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/chntpw/download and download the latest version of chntpw for 64-bit machines.

Note: In most cases it would be best to add the Debian Unstable branch to a package manager, but since the Live CD environment will revert to its original state once you reboot, it’ll be faster to just download the .deb file.

Save the .deb file to the default location.

You can close Firefox if desired. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, expanding the Accessories folder, and clicking on Terminal.

In the terminal window, enter the following text, hitting enter after each line:

chntpw will now be installed.

Using chntpw to reset your password

Before running chntpw, you will have to mount the hard drive that contains your Windows installation. In most cases, Ubuntu 9.10 makes this simple.

Click on Places at the top-left of the screen. If your Windows drive is easily identifiable – usually by its size – then left click on it.

If it is not obvious, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the correct one.

The correct hard drive will have the WINDOWS folder in it. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label that appears in the menu bar of the file browser.

If you don’t already have one open, start a terminal window by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

In the terminal window, enter the commands

pressing enter after each line. You should see one or more strings of text appear; one of those strings should correspond with the string that appeared in the title bar of the file browser earlier.

Change to that directory by entering the command

Since the hard drive label will be very annoying to type in, you can use a shortcut by typing in the first few letters or numbers of the drive label (capitalization matters) and pressing the Tab key. It will automatically complete the rest of the string (if those first few letters or numbers are unique).

We want to switch to a certain Windows directory. Enter the command:

Again, you can use tab-completion to speed up entering this command.

To change or reset the administrator password, enter:

SAM is the file that contains your Windows registry. You will see some text appear, including a list of all of the users on your system.

At the bottom of the terminal window, you should see a prompt that begins with “User Edit Menu:” and offers four choices. We recommend that you clear the password to blank (you can always set a new password in Windows once you log in). To do this, enter “1” and then “y” to confirm.

If you would like to change the password instead, enter “2”, then your desired password, and finally “y” to confirm.

If you would like to reset or change the password of a user other than the administrator, enter:

From here, you can follow the same steps as before: enter “1” to reset the password to blank, or “2” to change it to a value you provide.

And that’s it!

Conclusion

chntpw is a very useful utility provided for free by the open source community. It may make you think twice about how secure the Windows login system is, but knowing how to use chntpw can save your tail if your memory fails you two or eight times!

01 – 巾帼心
02 – 重生
03 – 霜之哀伤
04 – 风中的新娘
05 – 楚歌
06 – 哭泣的天使
07 – 冰封的天堂
08 – 海妖
09 – 月之魂

1 – Heart of Heroine
2 – Rebirth
3 – Grief of Frost
4 – Bride in Wind
5 – Song of Chu
6 – Weeping Angel
7 – Icebound Heaven
8 – Siren
9 – Spirit of Luna

Password: tusteam-ff

Fucking Frog
The Ultimate Source Team

Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

Accidentally deleting a file is a terrible feeling. Not being able to boot into Windows and undelete that file makes that even worse. Fortunately, you can recover deleted files on NTFS hard drives from an Ubuntu Live CD.

To show this process, we created four files on the desktop of a Windows XP machine, and then deleted them.

Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open a terminal by clicking Applications in the top left of the screen, and then selecting Accessories > Terminal.

To undelete our files, we first need to identify the hard drive that we want to undelete from. In the terminal window, type in:

and press enter.

What you’re looking for is a line that ends with HPSF/NTFS (under the heading System). In our case, the device is “/dev/sda1”. This may be slightly different for you, but it will still begin with /dev/. Note this device name.

If you have more than one hard drive partition formatted as NTFS, then you may be able to identify the correct partition by the size. If you look at the second line of text in the screenshot above, it reads “Disk /dev/sda: 136.4 GB, …” This means that the hard drive that Ubuntu has named /dev/sda is 136.4 GB large. If your hard drives are of different size, then this information can help you track down the right device name to use. Alternatively, you can just try them all, though this can be time consuming for large hard drives.

Now that you know the name Ubuntu has assigned to your hard drive, we’ll scan it to see what files we can uncover.

In the terminal window, type:

and hit enter. In our case, the command is:

The names of files that can recovered show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column tells us how much of that file can be recovered. Three of the four files that we originally deleted are showing up in this list, even though we shut down the computer right after deleting the four files – so even in ideal cases, your files may not be recoverable.

Nevertheless, we have three files that we can recover – two JPGs and an MPG.

Note: ntfsundelete is immediately available in the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. If you are in a different version of Ubuntu, or for some other reason get an error when trying to use ntfsundelete, you can install it by entering “sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs” in a terminal window.

To quickly recover the two JPGs, we will use the * wildcard to recover all of the files that end with .jpg.

In the terminal window, enter

which is, in our case,

The two files are recovered from the NTFS hard drive and saved in the current working directory of the terminal. By default, this is the home directory of the current user, though we are working in the Desktop folder.

Note that the ntfsundelete program does not make any changes to the original NTFS hard drive. If you want to take those files and put them back in the NTFS hard drive, you will have to move them there after they are undeleted with ntfsundelete. Of course, you can also put them on your flash drive or open Firefox and email them to yourself – the sky’s the limit!

We have one more file to undelete – our MPG.

Note the first column on the far left. It contains a number, its Inode. Think of this as the file’s unique identifier. Note this number.

To undelete a file by its Inode, enter the following in the terminal:

In our case, this is:

This recovers the file, along with an identifier that we don’t really care about. All three of our recoverable files are now recovered.

However, Ubuntu lets us know visually that we can’t use these files yet. That’s because the ntfsundelete program saves the files as the “root” user, not the “ubuntu” user.

We can verify this by typing the following in our terminal window:

We want these three files to be owned by ubuntu, not root. To do this, enter the following in the terminal window:

If the current folder has other files in it, you may not want to change their owner to ubuntu. However, in our case, we only have these three files in this folder, so we will use the * wildcard to change the owner of all three files.

The files now look normal, and we can do whatever we want with them.

Hopefully you won’t need to use this tip, but if you do, ntfsundelete is a nice command-line utility. It doesn’t have a fancy GUI like many of the similar Windows programs, but it is a powerful tool that can recover your files quickly.

S.N.G.

The Ultimate Source Team

“The ressources informations”

01 – Bright light
02 – O street
03 – The pit
04 – Neaningless
05 – Green Grass
06 – Pipe Bomb
07 – Legal drinking age
08 – Bashing and hating
09 – half awake
10 – Rock lobster (cover B-52)
11 – Walk away
12 – 20 $ Chris
13 – F**k the shit

Password: tusteam-sng

If you like it, you can buy it at http://www.ifmerch.com/fr/catalogs/brixton-robbers

S.N.G.
The Ultimate Source Team

For the futur, we post only three or more post a week.

Thanks to vistit us every week and leave us a message on the shout box; just on left side of this page.

To make a long short story, SNG was born on Audiogalaxy web site. After the AudioGalaxy death I pass my time on Soulseek Network. After a few years on this one, I migrate on torrents sites and I was a Team Member for an Important Tracker.

The Ultimate Source Team was born after my departure of Torrents World. Yes! I leaved my Team Member place by myself.

Today, this morning, I taked a big decision, this biggest in the SNG life. The time as come for me to close “The Ultimate Source Team”.

It’s hard, it’s tuff for me but you know what ? I need somthing new in my life, I need more time for me and anther person around me and I need a big clean up in my personnel life; a format c: lol .

And for finish this last post; I would like to thanks Fucking Frog ! Thanks you FF for all disscutions on chat line and a big thanks for all your post. I probally never see you in real life. It’s sad but true. Stay Heavy my friends.

I have another thanks, Zed ! Thanks you Zed, you are the best and you are a good friend too. Thanks for all your posts.

And the last thanks is for all visitors; thans you at you all !