win 7 password recovery with no loss of files

[AMDBOY]

Hastily changing my own win 7 user account password, when I found out someone I dont trust would have access to my pc while I was at work, I screwed myself out of user access. Ive tried ophcrack but it just hangs after a while and then pc shuts off. My password is 20 characters I thought.that might be holding ophcrack up. The windows recovery tool booted but didn't reveal the pass for free. I'll try the program mentioned in this thread. Any other easy , free apps suggested? TIA.

 

[matricks]

Use NTpasswd. You can reset your account password and log in without it, and set a new one.

If your drive is encrypted, or you have encrypted files (using EFS), you are out of luck. Encrypted drive (Bitlocker) will require a reinstall, and EFS encrypted files will be lost. Unless you have a very good idea what the password is (how long, what characters, placement of characters), you aren't going to recover a 20-ish character password.

 

[AMDBOY]

Thank you. Is it correct that if I have any EFS files that I would have had to make that choice and physically turned on encryption for any encrypted file. Or, can Win 7 pro do that automatically w/o my knowledge?
I know the 6 characters that I added to my "regular 14 character password". But uh, a typo in a hurry maybe? I'd rather not spend $, but will if necessary to not lose data. Thanks for your help. From reading, I thought perhaps a recovery app would be safer , no loss of EFS.

 

[matricks]

You have to enable encryption in file/folder properties dialog, this is what EFS does.

The only data you will lose is exactly that, encrypted data. If you haven't used encryption that is tied to your user account you should be fine. If you're worried, just boot a live CD (e.g. Ubuntu) and copy your important stuff before you make any changes. If you can read the files you copied, they aren't encrypted.

What would you do with money? Commerial software won't magically crack it. Enough cloud computing resources will, but it will probably cost quite a bit, even if it's just the 6-7 uncertain characters you have to figure out.

TLDR: If uncertain, use live CD to backup important stuff. Then use NTpasswd to reset. Otherwise, go directly to NTpasswd.

 

[AMDBOY]

Thanks for the info always good to backup. I was able to get windows password recovery tool to boot from cd but it was the trial version . They wanted like $44.99. It said if I wanted to see the user passwords to purchase the app from the link below. I guess that's pretty straightforward, just not what I wanted to see. I dont ever remember turning on encryption. Thanks for your time, I appreciate it.