How to: Override your Windows password

Whether you have forgotten your own password, or you want to hack into another user account on Windows XP or Windows 7 PCs, here is a very easy trick or method, which does not require you to download any third-party utility or run complex commands. This is a very straightforward trick and the necessary requirements are already present with you. You may consider this method a security flaw in Windows, but there are ways that you can also block it before somebody else uses it to get into your PC.

However, if you do so, there are chances that you might not be able to use it yourself, if you get locked out of your own account. You might then need to use other resources (like Linux) to crack/reset your password. It is always advisable to enable the ‘Administrator’ account and set a password to it. In this way, you can get into the Administrator account and reset other user passwords.

Let's get started

Windows, be it Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, has a built-in feature called ‘Sticky Keys'. This is an accessibility feature that was implemented to help people with certain types of physical disabilities and also to help reduce the strain of repetitive keystrokes. It helps serializing keystrokes, instead of pressing multiple keys at the same time. You can find out more from the system’s control panel. In this article, we shall show you how to take advantage of this feature in Windows and turn it into a password hacking option.

Step 1

The trick involves replacing the Sticky Keys control panel with the command prompt and then triggering the password reset commands from within the command prompt window. However, doing this is not as easy as said. Since the Sticky Keys cannot be easily renamed when the PC is logged in, we have to do it from the recovery mode. 

Step 2

In this workshop, Sticky Keys is not actually used to hack the password, but we shall make use of its features to pull up the command prompt in administrator mode and do the needful. We would need to pull up the command prompt before the PC is logged-in, in order to change the password. However, since the command prompt cannot be accessed during pre-login, the Sticky Keys option can be used here. Nevertheless, to get the necessary hack in place, we need to run a few commands. Let’s proceed ahead on how to do it.

Step 3

First, you need to boot your PC using your Windows installation DVD. Make sure you have your BIOS set to boot from the optical drive. Once you boot from the OS installation DVD, select the option to repair your computer. Windows will start loading the necessary files it needs and starts searching for problems that it can detect.

Step 4