sampasswd (8) - Linux Manuals

sampasswd: reset passwords of users in the SAM user database

NAME

sampasswd - reset passwords of users in the SAM user database

SYNOPSIS

sampasswd [options] -uuser <samfile>

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents briefly the sampasswd command. This manual page was written for the Debian distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.

sampasswd is a non-interactive command line utility that can reset a user's password and/or the user's account bits from the SAM user database file of a Microsoft Windows system (Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, etc.). This file is usually located at \WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM on the file system of a Microsoft Windows Operating System

On success, the program does not output any informatin and the exit code is 0.

OPTIONS

-h
Show summary of options.
-r
Reset the user's password.
-a
Reset all the users. If this option is used there is no need to specify the next option.
-u <user>
User to change. The user value can be provided as a username, or a RID number in hexadecimal (if the username is preceded with '0x'). Usernames including international characters will probably not work.
-l
Lists the users in the SAM database.
-H
Output human readable output. The program by default will print a parsable table unless this option is used.
-N
Do not allocate more information, only allow the editing of existing values with same size.
-E
Do not expand the hive file (safe mode).
-t
Print debug information of allocated blocks.
-v
Print verbose information and debug messages.

EXAMPLES

sampasswd -r -u theboss
Reset the password of a user named 'theboss', if found.

sampasswd -r -u 0x3ea
Reset the password of the user with RID '0x3a'.

samusrgrp -r -a
Reset the password of all the users in the Administrator's group (0x220)

samusrgrp -r -f
Reset the password of the administrative users with the lowest RID number. This does not include the built-in administrator (0x1f4) unless no other administrative user can be found in the database file.

KNOWN BUGS

If the username includes international (non-ASCII) characters the program will not (usually) find it. Use the RID number instead.

AUTHOR

This program was written by Petter N Hagen.

This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino <jfs [at] debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

SEE ALSO

chntpwd, reged, samusrgrp
You will find more information available on how this program works, in the text files /usr/share/doc/chntpw/README.txt and /usr/share/doc/chntpw/MANUAL.txt

More documentation is available at the upstream's author site: http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/