Jan 12

Lost your Windowze password ?   Posted by sharps, tagged with

I recently inherited a new laptop so I took the opportunity to install the latest (as yet unreleased) version of the Java Desktop System - on the whole I was pretty pleased with what I saw but my experience was marred by the fact that the new laptop isn't very ameanable to running Linux - I ran into the typical ACPI / APM issues (so no hibernate), the wireless network card is only supported by a compile-it-yourself driver (which seems too new to be included in any mainstream distro), mouse support was flaky, there seemed to be a keyboard bounce problem andI had real fun and games getting the display to work at 1280x800.

Then, to add to the fun I managed to screw the existing Windowze* installation, leaving me with 2 OSs - neither of which would allow me to get any work done; which is the subject of this blog. To cut a long story short I had to boot from CD an run the windowze recovery console; however to recover a windowze system you need the admin password which I didn't know. After a quick IM chat with the previous owner I found out that there was no admin password, hmm. So I tried that - no luck, you get 3 attempts then you need to boot from CD again (which takes about five minutes); I tried various other obvious password but no luck (I'm guessing that the recovery console doesn't accept a null password).

After some quicky googling I found a host of tools that allow you to reset / change any password on a Windowze machine - I tried one (Austrumi) and it worked first time - awesome. Awesome, but really pretty scary - basically if you have a Windoze machine with local authentication and don't encrypt your files it would take no time at all for someone to access everything and/or lock you out of your machine - all they need is a CD/DVD drive (or bootable USB) and a bit of time - really scary. My advice (if you have to use Windoze) - add a BIOS password, a screensaver password and encrypt your filesystem.

So basically I'm now running Windowze only on my laptop - with all the associated risks (and security tax) until I can find time to massage JDS 3 (or some other distro) into liking my laptop more.

If you have a Sony Vaio VGN-S170B and have managed to install Linux (any distro) and get everything working with minimal fuss - I'd love to hear from you.

*I feel a public statement regarding my OS affiliation is in order here. I have a lot of reasons not to like MS - I have been shafted a couple of times by their switches in technology, poor products, lapse security and questionable business practices. However, Windows XP is really nice and it is one of the few OSs that runs applications I use regularly for digital image / audio and video manipulation - though, if I had the budget I could almost certainly get away with one of these. So, I have a couple of machines at home that run Windowze XP - one is dual boot with RHEL - the other is pure Windowze; on my laptop I have been running Linux exclusively for about 4 years and I have spent countless days / hours re-compiling kernels, drivers etc. I was a big fan of RH until they left the desktop market and have been using JDS ever since.