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Re: Disabling syskey on XP pro

Subject: Re: Disabling syskey on XP pro
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:52:03 -0400
Denis Jedig wrote:
Rocky wrote:

Hi List, one of my client forgot his syskey password, i tried
booting up on erd 2005 and run/update syskey.exe but it
did not help. Is there anyway to disable syskey from running
on startup or updating the syskey password?

Since syskey is there to protect the user databases (SAM) by means of strong encryption (and the password is protecting the en-/decryption key BTW), your only way around this would be to try to bruteforce the password. You always could reset the SAM of course, but would loose any local accounts, groups and trusts.
The ERD will only contain encrypted versions of your SAM BTW.


Denis

The ntpasswd utility will blank out the SAM like it never existed. However, once you choose to use this utility you can not re-enable the syskey so it should only be used as a last resort.

http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/

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