User Name Help for Asus Laptop

I changed the hard drive and did a system restore in my son's Asus laptop
Windows 7

I don't know the user name, but I know the password.

So I put the old drive back in and the user name above the password is Dan.

Dan doesn't work.

Is there a way I can find the correct user name???


Thanks,

Mark

On 5/23/2011, MWB posted:
> I changed the hard drive and did a system restore in my son's Asus laptop
> Windows 7

> I don't know the user name, but I know the password.

> So I put the old drive back in and the user name above the password is Dan.

> Dan doesn't work.

> Is there a way I can find the correct user name???


> Thanks,

> Mark

If the user name appears, then it should be correct, and it's the
password that you need. Windows doesn't list user names that aren't
there... Also, it's possible that there's no password on that name. Did
you try leaving the password field blank and pressing return?

I have no idea what you mean by "did a system restore". You can't do a
system restore from an empty drive. Do you mean you restored from a
backup? If so the user names and passwords should be the same on the
new drive as on the one you backed up from.

Hang around here, though. Others might reply with more detailed and
accurate info.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On Mon, 23 May 2011 18:53:12 -0400, "MWB" <> wrote:

>I changed the hard drive and did a system restore in my son's Asus laptop
>Windows 7
>
>I don't know the user name, but I know the password.
>
>So I put the old drive back in and the user name above the password is Dan.
>
>Dan doesn't work.
>
>Is there a way I can find the correct user name???
>


Mark,

Does Control Panel / User Accounts give you a clue?

MWB wrote:
> I changed the hard drive and did a system restore in my son's Asus
> laptop Windows 7
>
> I don't know the user name, but I know the password.
>
> So I put the old drive back in and the user name above the password is Dan.
>
> Dan doesn't work.
>
> Is there a way I can find the correct user name???
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark

Everyone loves a challenge.

There could be some info in the SAM registry file. (For example, I found
a password hint in plaintext in there.) But there are better ways to
get where you want to go.

This tool automates just enough of this process for your purposes.

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Download the bootable CD image.

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/cd110511.zip

Extract cd110511.iso from it - 4,700,160 bytes

If you upload the .iso file to virustotal.com and have it scanned, you
could end up here. It looks clean. Check for yourself.

http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/...cf7-1306065969

To experiment, I did the following.

1) Grabbed the .vhd image of my laptop. That gives me a copy of the
C: drive.

2) Fired up VirtualPC 2007 on my WinXP desktop. Made the .vhd file
the "disk" for a new virtual machine.

3) Started up that virtual machine, and had VirtualPC 2007 mount
cd110511.iso as the boot CD for that "system". So cd110511 is
going to boot the system, and the only hard drive it will be
able to see in the virtual environment, will be the C: drive
copy from my laptop.

4) The boot CD has boot options, but I didn't need any. I hit
carriage return and it booted. (Since VirtualPC 2007 emulates
a 440BX based motherboard from ten years ago, drivers for that
kind of hardware are easy. If the laptop is really modern, it's
possible a necessary driver will be missing, and the experiment
will be a lot harder.)

5) For just about every prompt after that, accept the default.

6) I finally got to a step entitled "What to do?" I selected
"Edit user data and passwords". Now, you're not going to really
edit them, just view them.

7) In there I was presented with a table

Administrator
Guest
HomeGroupUsers
Paul

So apparently my account name is Paul.

The purpose of that tool, is supposed to be overwriting the password
with something like a blank one, so you can get into an account and
set the password to something you want. The idea is, it doesn't give
you the password, it edits things so you can get into the account.
Or something like that.

Note that overwriting the password can have side effects. If the
user has encrypted files (EFS), they can lose access to them if
they haven't prepared a "key disk" or recovery disk of some kind.
So if you're "doing this to someone else's stuff", you'd better
have a pretty good idea of whether EFS is involved or not, before
resetting the password.

Rather than edit anything, I pressed control-c and the program
crashed (or declared a problem with the Linux kernel it was using).
I don't really know what it wanted me to type, so I tried control-c
rather than mess things up.

*******

There are actual password cracker programs, such as ophcrack,
but I have no idea how you use such a thing. This makes reference
to Vista, and I don't know if the details of Windows 7 differ
drastically or not. When I compared WinXP to Windows 7, I found
"SAM" in the same place, but they love to change things for Windows 7,
and changing the password scheme would be fair game.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ophcrack/

Ophcrack may use rainbow tables. The size of the tables you download,
varies with the assumed complexity of the password. If a person places
punctuation in their password, instead of simple numbers and letters,
it requires a much larger table. The "free" table, suitable for
simple password constructs (numbers and letters) is 400MB or so,
but some of the other files I saw listed, were GB in size. That
would be fun for another time perhaps (I'm not going to chow
down on that right now).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_tables

*******

So by booting with cd110511.iso , it should be possible to verify whether
the account is "Dan" or not. Messing up the password is optional. If you
do so, anything protected with EFS could well be toast.

Since you still have some kind of recovery image of some sort, I suppose
you have room to mess around, then reload the image if the experiment
goes sour.

Paul

On Mon, 23 May 2011 18:53:12 -0400, MWB wrote:
>
> I changed the hard drive and did a system restore in my son's Asus laptop
> Windows 7
>
> I don't know the user name, but I know the password.
>
> So I put the old drive back in and the user name above the password is Dan.
>
> Dan doesn't work.
>
> Is there a way I can find the correct user name???

Probably it's one of the subfolders under C:\Users.

I say "probably" because if the user name was changed after the
initial setup then the folder name does not change.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...

I want to thank all of you for your help.

My son came home from Afghanistan and handed it to me. I had to buy a new
hard drive, power supply and the recovery disks.

I dumped sand out of it.

I am reinstalling the recovery software again and giving it another try.

I believe the user name is Windows User and I will get it going.

Thanks,
Mark

I got it.

Thanks All

Mark

On 5/23/2011, MWB posted:
> I got it.

> Thanks All

> Mark

Ok, how about telling us what worked? It might help me, some of the
other responders, and some of the silent readers of this thread.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

"Gene E. Bloch" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On 5/23/2011, MWB posted:
>> I got it.
>
> Ok, how about telling us what worked? It might help me, some of the other
> responders, and some of the silent readers of this thread.

Reading between the lines it appears he restored to factory with the
recovery disks. SO a new owner account would have been made at first boot.