Recovering passwords from a windows 2003 server

Sometimes when a business decide to switch his computer maintenance to another company switched company rejects to give server passwords with or without good reason.

There’s a lot of ways of reset administrator password, but recover any of then can be better.

If you need to recover passwords from a windows 2003 server a easy way is shutdown the server and start a linux live CD like ubuntu.

If you can access to windows filesystem you can access to SAM data, a database with local passwords 馃槢 .

You only need to copy %SystemRoot%/system32/config directory to a flash memory or another storage device.

Install into another computer Ophcrack software. In my laptop running fedora 21 executeas root

dnf install ophcrack

Download XP rainbow tables from here http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/tables.php

Open ophcrack

Click on Tables -> install

and load downloaded tables

ophcrack load tables

Now at load button select Encrypted SAM and open the folder %SystemRoot%/system32/config recovered using Linux liveCD

ophcrack main windowand finally click on Crack button

recovered passwordsOnly took half minute, literally in recover 13 of 14 passwords.

Enjoy