CMOS Battery Removal Kills Monitor Signal

originally posted by: ipsedixit
a reply to: Ksihkehe

lol. The elderly person whose computer I am working on had a previous technical volunteer who was very, very, very security conscious, and no I am not working on George H. W. Bush's computer. It's a long story. I don't want to rant so I'll just leave it at that.

I did work on a computer used by George Bush Senior when he was president. (A visit to Australia's then Prime Minister, Paul Keating).

I can assure you, all he did was play Microsoft Golf.

I wasn't particularly impressed by either of them but met with Barry Jones there, who was a really good bloke with an impressive intellect.

a reply to: chr0naut

Wow!! The elderly person I am helping is no slouch. He doesn't know anything about computers but he is in his eighties and can do word processing in Tibetan, making beautiful Tibetan "pecha" (like prayer books). He does other stuff too. By far the smartest person I've ever met.

Currently I am trying to do this back door reset of the administration password and running into all kinds of roadblocks. I won't list the entire gamut of instances but the most serious ones have been the "trusted Installer" block against writing in a protected folder, like the System 32 folder. and surprisingly the fact that I can't find my administrator password in my Macbook (running High Sierra).

The reason I went to the Mac is that its procedures for modifying the status of a "write protected" volume are much more straightforward (at first glance) than overcoming the TrustedInstaller block in Windows, and fortunately the Mac can read the files on an external NTFS volume like my "client's" HD.

Just an update.

a reply to: ipsedixit

The complexity of a password is its primary issue.

Rainbow tables are particularly effective if the password is not too complex. Six or less alphanumeric characters should be crack-able in much less than ten minutes.

Rainbow tables are where a database of pre-calculated hashes is looked up, in reverse, to get the associated password.

One distribution with pre-built rainbow tables is "Ophcrack". You can google it and download some free tables and it might help. If the complexity is higher, the time to crack and size of the hash tables grows exponentially, though. The larger tables are usually not free.

I could probably help if you PM me.

Also, the encryption built in to XP itself is trivial. Far easier to crack than Kerebos in later versions of Windows.

a reply to: chr0naut

The OS in question is actually Windows 7 Ultimate. A fact that I had overlooked. I'm interested in this approach, but a little wary of the learning curve involved. I've already spent a considerable amount of time on this, probably in the vicinity of 14 hours, most of which was spent in blind alleys.

If I can get the administrator password to my Macbook, get into their Terminal, I can reset the "properties" of the System 32 folder on the client's HD, write to the folder and carry out the backdoor crack to reset his admin password. Getting the Mac admin password is not difficult, it is just that I am already exhausted from all the preliminaries that went on today.

But if you want to PM me with info and links, please do. I may not need to do it that way, but at least I will know what to do if necessary.

a reply to: ipsedixit

I ran into problems using NANO from the Terminal console in Sierra and had to give up on that approach to getting into the write protected System 32 folder on the client's HD, but the day was saved by someone in a distant city who is still in contact with the client's old IT expert and she was able to phone him and get the much sought after administration password.

Thanks to all who responded to this thread. I do appreciate it.

. . . uhhh . . . Now that I have the Administrator Password, I am able to get into the administrator account. The IT guy who set things up on this computer and who vanished a couple of years ago, disabled the automatic update service, so Windows has not been updated in two years. I tried to update it in the control panel but learned that the update service has been disabled.

To cut a long story short, I think the IT guy who used to work on this computer (normally operated by an elderly user, needing minimal functions, a word processor and Internet Explorer) decide to use the computer as a way of flexing his (amateur) technical chops and set it up as if it were a computer in a big corporation where the sys admins keep an iron grip on all settings of every computer in their control, by manually tweaking things globally. Only in this case it was done just to one computer.

Is their any way to reset to defaults and wipe out every customized setting this person put in place?

As usual, all responses appreciated. The computer is a 32 bit edition of Windows 7 Ultimate.