A friend of mine generated a new Administrator password for our Windows server with KeePass. At the same time, my... er... his PC manufacturer's auto-update was installing new graphics card drivers. I'm sure you can see where this is going — the password was successfully changed at the server and then the graphics card driver update failed, resulting in a crash before the generated password was saved in the KeePass database. Schoolboy error, I know.
My host provides a recovery mode for Windows, but for some reason it won't boot (of all the luck) and they're taking forever to look into it. I can boot into a Linux (debian) recovery system and mount the Windows drive, so I'm wondering if there's anything I can do from there? My Linux knowledge is pretty poor, I know there's chntpw
but I'm not sure how to install it (apt-get
is available, but I don't know which source to add or how to add it).
I've seen similar questions but they all involve having physical access to the machine. The responses to those questions are usually:
Boot into the recovery system and replace one of the accessibility executables with cmd.exe, then use the key combination at the logon screen.
I don't think I can do this because I can't access the logon screen via Remote Desktop. I'm always asked for credentials before the connection is complete.Use chntpw from Linux to change the password.
As mentioned above, my experience with Linux command line is poor. Aside from this, I've heard that it changes machine passwords only and I'm not sure if the Administrator is an Active Directory account.
As a last resort I can re-image the machine but I spent the last week setting everything up and I'm hoping I can avoid all that time spent being for naught. I can use PuTTY for terminal and WinSCP to play around with the files if that helps.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Update - I can now access the Windows Rescue System via TightVNC. However, all the commands apply to this separate instance of Windows - how can I change/recover my password on the main Windows installation?