1. After a bit of research I found out that there is ophcrack. I downloaded the live CD as an ISO image and set VMWare to load that CD.

2. When VMWare starts and before windows starts booting I clicked on the VMWare screen and pressed ESC. This gives me the menu to select the device I want to use to boot.

3. I chose to boot from the CD.

4. The ophcrack live CD starts loading, but when it finishes I get a:  “No partition containing hashes found” error.

5. The problem seems to be that the Windows installation is on a SCSI virtual disk that is not recognised by this distribution of linux. Tried “fdisk -l” on a terminal from within the ophcrack live CD and it didn’t return any results.  To be able to crack the password I need to have access to the “WIndows/System32/config/ folder of my virtual hard disk. So…

6.  I created a second virtual hard disk in the same VMWare virtual machine. I downloaded an ISO image of Ubuntu

7. Installed Ubuntu on the newly created hard disk.

8. Boot using Ubuntu. Ubuntu was able to access the virtual hard disk of the windows installation. I copied the folder “WIndows/System32/config/” on my local Windows 7 installation.

9. Downloaded ophcrack for Windows and installed it on my Windows 7. Also downloaded the XP Free Small Table.

10. Launched ophcrack and clicked on “Tables”->Install and selected the folder where I had downloaded the XP Free Small Table file (if it is a zip file you need to unzip it).

11. Select Load->Encypted SAM and select the “config” folder I had copied from the VMWare installation (through Ubuntu).

12. Got my password in 45 seconds!!

1. sudo ifconfig to get a list of all the network interfaces. There you can see the name of the networking interface that you need to reset. In my case I wanted to reset interface “eth3″. So I did:
2.sudo dhclient -r eth3 to ipconfig /release
3.sudo dhclient eht3 to ipconfig /renew

That’s it! Got a new IP and I can access the internet!

My set-up: A Toshiba 2450-S203 laptop (P4@2.8), an nvidia video card (don’t remember the details of the chip) and a wireless pcmcia linksys WPC11 version 4.

My experiences:

Mepis 6.5

First I tried Mepis 6.5. It worked very well out of the box and the wireless card connected to our router without a problem. However since Mepis 6.5 is based on an older version of ubuntu its repository has reaaaaly old versions of software. This was a problem and since Mepis 7.0 is coming out, I decided to try version 7.0 RC2.

Mepis 7.0RC2

Installed well, but I couldn’t make the wireless card work. I sent a post to the mepislovers forum and received a number of useful answers. It could be the version ndiswrapper that comes with Mepis 7, or the driver. So I had to either download the latest source code of ndiswrapper and compile it, or try different version… Too much work for a RC version.

Kubuntu 7.1

As I have been a windows user, I decide to go for another kde distribution, kubuntu. The installation went smoothly. However I couldn’t connect the wireless card to our router. Kubuntu would recognise it, but as soon as I tried to connect to the router… kernel panic! The caps lock light flashed and the system was unresponsive. I tried to blacklist the native drivers and use ndiswrapper with my windows drivers… but to install ndiswrapper it asked for the installation cd! (Even though I was already connected to the internet with my ethernet cable).

I managed to make it word with ndiswrapper and the system was quite stable. So, now let’s try ubuntu for a change…

Ubuntu 7.1

As expected I had the same problem with the wireless card and  resolved it using ndiswrapper again. I have to confess that I liked the interface better than KDE. It was quite fast and stable. The problem is that I need windows anyway (some .NET development, software which don’t have a linux version) . I can use virtualization (vmware) to run windows from within linux, but to do that I need more hard disk space and probably I will need again the firewall and antivirus installed.

The verdict?? I might try to switch to linux after I finish writing up, but right now I don’t have the time, resources (i.e. hard disk space) to do it properly. However there are some things I didn’t like. First of all in (k)ubuntu, when the native wireless card drivers crashed, NOTHING was logged in the log files, no warning, no nothing (at least a windows blue screen gives you a message with the address/module that caused the crash.).  The other annoying thing… why do you need the installation cd if you are already on the internet and the package manager can find the binaries on the internet?

I mean ok… you blaim windows for the blue screens of death, you blaim them for asking the installation cd all the time… so people say switch to linux (or get a mac).. you switch to linux and see things are not much better there.

Having said that I hope that some day I will have the time to be actively involved in a linux distro.