Comment on Null terminator
behindthesailboats@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Right, So I actually did something similar. On some version of windows I noticed that ctrl-backspace was adding another character to the password, instead of deleting it. So I included it in my password. Then I updated to a new version of windows and got locked out since they updated the password backend to where it would actually delete the password instead of a adding the character, so I had no way of typing out my password. Ended up just nuking the computer.
I know, this is easier said than done for someone unfamiliar with this stuff, but maybe still good to know that this is an option in future:
You can prepare a “Linux Live USB” and select in the BIOS that it should boot off of that.
It’ll start a complete OS off of that USB, so you can access the hard drive (assuming you didn’t enable disk encryption) and at the very least backup your files, or sometimes even resolve whatever keeps you from accessing Windows.
Remember: Those were probably the times of a single computer at home and having a spare laptop somewhere ready for that is not the default.
Those were the times when I had to pull out my hard drive, ride my bike to my best mate’s house, and plug it into their PC so I could finish up a report due the next day. All because Windows 95 didn’t shut down cleanly and refused to boot.
You can also create a Windows installer USB stick, boot off of that, and start a command line to access the installed Windows system. There you can copy CMD.exe over the file path of the accessibility options app.
Then boot back to your installed system’s login screen, hit the button for accessibility options, and you have a working command line on the installed system you can use to reset your admin password.
This sort of nonsense right here is why infosec people warn about having physical access to machines
Was that the same version of Windows where you could click “cancel” to bypass the login prompt?
There was one like that? I remember the sticky-keys bypass but not that.
All the login prompt did back then was let users save user specific settings. Your best bet back then was a BIOS password.
Some internal software at my job does that and I hate it
x4740N@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Could have just researched what character was being inserted by the ctrl backspace and then used the keyboard to insert the character from its ascii or unicode code to login and then changed your password before nuking your computer
mercator_rejection@programming.dev 1 year ago
But with what computer?!
ludwig@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your phone maybe?
Jumper775@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your what? Like those things with the dial that are attached to the wall? How are you meant to do it with that?
DrQuint@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh, you’re young
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I’m sure this version of windows was before phones had screens attached, and likely before the internet was ubiquitous. They likely had one computer and would have had to go somewhere else to look it up if that was even an option.
behindthesailboats@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I actually did do that! I found the ASCII code but couldn’t get it inputted correctly to the password. The nuking came after I gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it. What’s life without restarting every now and then?