Reset Windows Password /w KNOPPIX.

If you forget a password for your user on your Windows system (especially if the user is administrator), your computer immediately becomes a paperweight. It’s like being locked out of your car without a spare set of keys and without a way to contact a locksmith. Use Knoppix as your locksmith to reset the password to a new value or even completely erase it.

User accounts have an interesting history in Windows. The Windows 9x series did offer usernames and passwords, but every user could overwrite every other user’s files, and the system did not offer any real security. If you forget your password in Windows 9x, resetting it is as simple as deleting a .pwd file with a DOS disk. With Windows NT, 2000, and XP, Microsoft has increased its user security by creating different user accounts on the same system and passwords that protect them. However, unlike in Windows 9x, if you forget your Administrator password, your only recourse is to purchase a tool to reset your Windows password or to reinstall Windows to create a new administrator account. If you have a Knoppix disc, you can download and use the chntpw tool, which is a small program that lets you reset the local passwords on a Windows system, and return to your system.

Get chntpw

The chntpw tool is part of the ntpasswd package, which can be downloaded in boot floppy form from its web site at http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/. However, this gives you a floppy image and requires that you mount multiple loopback entries to extract the utility from the floppy image to use under Knoppix. While you can simply create an ntpasswd boot floppy, this means yet another rescue disk to carry with you, and the beauty of Knoppix is that you have access to all of your recovery tools in a single disc. Luckily, the chntpw tool is now part of Debian unstable, which means that you can grab it directly from Debian’s repository.

You could use the apt-get wrapper, which is included for Knoppix, to download chntpw. However, to be certain you retrieve the latest version of chntpw, you must run the apt-get update, which downloads about 10 times as much data per repository as the 85-KB chntpw package. It saves bandwidth and time to download the package directly.

Fix The Windows Boot.ini file with KNOPPIX!![2]

One thing that has been missing from Knoppix (and Linux in general) is the ability to safely write to NTFS partitions. Now with Knoppix 3.4, you can edit, delete, and move files on your NTFS partition—jobs that are difficult with the Windows Recovery CD!

While the Linux kernel has been able to read NTFS partitions for some time, writing to them has always been considered very dangerous. The NTFS spec is a closed spec that requires kernel hackers to reverse engineer it to make a driver that supports it. However, this can be very problematic: if a programmer reverse engineers NTFS 3.0, she must repeat the process when NTFS 4.0 is released. Writing to NTFS has been so dangerous that instead of just warning users, some kernels go as far as disabling write support in the NTFS driver itself. Recently, a solution to write to NTFS partitions has appeared with Captive NTFS. This solution actually uses the NTFS drivers that Windows itself uses, and is included in Knoppix 3.4.

Captive NTFS is still somewhat experimental, and while it has worked for many people, there is a chance for data loss, so be sure to back up any important files on filesystems you mount this way.

Configure Captive NTFS

The Knoppix Captive NTFS wizard makes it easy to configure and use the Captive NTFS system. When you run the wizard, it scans all the drives on your computer for the Microsoft-provided NTFS drivers it needs to safely write to your NTFS filesystems. Click K Menu|KNOPPIXUtilities|Captive NTFS to launch the program. The wizard that appears automates the process of finding and using the NTFS .dlls. Click Forward to see a listing of the system files that Captive NTFS has already found on your Knoppix system. Click Forward again, and the wizard mounts and scans your hard drives for the essential files it needs.

Fix The Windows Boot.ini file with KNOPPIX!!

If a Windows boot.ini file gets corrupted, you might find yourself unable to boot back into Windows. While the Windows Recovery CD can restore a default boot file, unlike Knoppix, it won’t let you edit it directly.

Back in the old days of Windows, you could change many different startup settings by editing .ini files that were in the root of your hard drive. Over the years, Microsoft has moved most of the settings that control configuration to the registry, but there is one important file that remains, boot.ini. In this file, you can find information that the Windows boot loader uses to determine booting options and, in the case of more than one Windows OS on a system, which OS to boot. For example, this is a boot.ini file that allows you to boot between Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINNT="Windows 2000" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional"
/fastdetect

This file is split into two parts: the part that contains settings for the boot loader that starts with [boot loader] and the part that containing the different operating systems available for booting that starts with [operating systems]. The first option, timeout, controls how many seconds the boot loader waits before booting the default operating system. The default option tells the boot loader which operating system to boot if the timeout has passed.

Install GENTO with KNOPPIX…

Installing Gentoo can be an overwhelming and uninviting task because you are limited to a shell interface, and the computer is unavailable for tasks during the installation. That is, of course, unless you use the Knoppix CD.

Knoppix makes installing Gentoo a much less painful experience. The Knoppix hardware detection seems to be more robust and is much more successful than the Gentoo system. A Gentoo install involves downloading packages from the Internet, so Knoppix provides you with much better support for your particular NIC. Furthermore, your computer is still fully functional while you compile the base Gentoo system, which provides you with some additional advantages. First, the compilation process for a Gentoo install can take hours, so with Knoppix, you can browse the Web, play games, and get work done while the system compiles in the background. Second, you can browse the Web with a graphical web browser, so if you run into a roadblock in the installation process, you can head straight to the Gentoo forums at http://forums.gentoo.org to ask a question. The installation instructions are also readily accessible (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml), so there is no need to print them out. The instructions are very thorough and explain not only what each step is, but also why it is necessary.

These two reasons are also true for installing Gentoo from a chrooted environment on an existing Linux install. However, Knoppix gives you the advantage of using the entire hard disk for your Gentoo install. If you have only a single hard drive and Linux is already on it, you can’t exactly wipe it entirely clean while you are in the middle of using it.

Reset Linux Password!!

If you have forgotten a user’s password under Linux and you have root access, you don’t usually need a rescue disk because you can reset the password with the root account. Even if you have forgotten the root password, most Linux distributions let you log in to single-user mode (add the single or init=1 argument to the kernel at the boot prompt) and change the password from the root account.

A paranoid system administrator might password-protect or disable single-user mode altogether in /etc/inittab, but you can still get to a root prompt to reset the password if you pass init=/bin/sh to the kernel when you boot. However, if the boot loader itself is password-protected and you forgot the password, you must have some sort of rescue disk to reset the password both in the boot loader and in the /etc/passwd file.

It is simple to reset a password in Linux, and to reset a password with Knoppix requires just one extra step. Boot the Knoppix CD and mount your Linux system with read/write permissions:

knoppix@ttyp0[knoppix]$ sudo mount -o rw /dev/hda1

 /mnt/hda1