Ophcrack is a free password recovery program that is used by system administrators. It uses an older system called Rainbow Tables, invented by the same original developer. According to the Ophcrack project website, the program is able to recover 99.9 per cent of all alphanumeric passwords on the computer within seconds. Ophcrack is an open source project. While the software is meant to run automatically, if an installation error occurs, it will need to be used in manual mode.

  • Ophcrack is a free password recovery program that is used by system administrators.
  • According to the Ophcrack project website, the program is able to recover 99.9 per cent of all alphanumeric passwords on the computer within seconds.

Insert an Ophcrack LiveCD into your computer's CD drive.

Open the "Terminal" program on your PC. This will load the black and white MS-DOS prompt.

Type "/home/tux/launch.sh" and hit "Enter." Ophcrack should start running. If you get a response, "No partition containing hashes found," go to Section 2.

Type "fdisk - 1" into the DOS prompt to see which partition contains Windows. Write down the partition name when it comes up.

Enter "su" into the prompt; this is short for "super user." If you are asked for a password, the password is "root."

  • Type "/home/tux/launch.sh" and hit "Enter."
  • Enter "su" into the prompt; this is short for "super user."

Enter "mkdir /mnt/ntfs" into the prompt.

Type "mount /dev/" with the name of the partition containing windows after the "/", followed by "/mnt/ntfs".

Reboot Windows if Ophcrack does not load. Open the Terminal application and enter "mount -o force -t ntfs-3g /dev/" followed by the name of the partition containing Windows, followed by "/mnt/ntfs".