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How to Remove BIOS Password Using The Jumper Settings

March 7th, 2014 by Admin

Have you ever been locked out of your computer by a forgotten BIOS password? Without the password, you can’t access BIOS to change boot order. This also means you can’t change the boot order to boot into a CD or USB drive. Luckily you can reset all BIOS settings (including the BIOS admin/user password) by just removing the CMOS battery from the motherboard for a few moments and then putting it back in. However, this is not the case for some computers and you may also need to change the jumper settings. This trick works on Acer, Dell, HP/Compaq, Toshiba, Asus, Gateway, Samsung, Lenovo, Sony and Apple computers.

remove-bios-password

Warning: There is a risk of hardware damage and of personal injury. Follow this procedure exactly to avoid personal injury. Not all motherboards have removable CMOS batteries. If the battery won’t come loose, don’t force it.

How to Remove BIOS Password Using The Jumper Settings?

  1. Shut down the computer and then unplug the power cable.
  2. Disconnect all external devices and wait about 15 seconds.
  3. Press and hold the Power button while your computer is unplugged to dissipate static electricity from the motherboard.
  4. Before touching anything inside your computer, ground yourself with a wrist-grounding strap or by touching an unpainted metal surface, such as the metal at the back of your computer. While you work, periodically touch an unpainted metal surface to dissipate static electricity.
  5. Open up your computer case and remove the CMOS battery.
  6. Locate the password jumper on the motherboard, look for the letters PWD, PSWD, PSWDCLR, CLEAR CMOS, CLEAR, CLR, JCMOS1 or PASSWORD. The jumper is typically located on the edge of the motherboard or physically near the CMOS battery.
  7. To remove the BIOS password, you will need to change the jumper settings.

    • If there are 3 pins under the jumper, moving the jumper over one pin will change it. For example if the jumper is covering pins 1 and 2, move it so that it is covering pins 2 & 3. If the jumper is covering pins 2 and 3, reinstall the jumper over pins 1 and 2.
    • If there are only 2 pins under the jumper, simply remove the jumper from the pins.

    bios-jumper

  8. Put the CMOS battery back in and close the case.
  9. Reconnect the power cable and turn on your laptop. The BIOS password should be cleared. After the Windows logon screen appears, turn off your laptop again.
  10. Disconnect the power cable. Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds to release static electricity from the system. Replace the jumper to its original position. Close the case and the computer is ready to be used again.

This method works well for desktop computers, however this is not practical for laptop users unless the warranty expired long time ago. BIOS password can add an extra layer of security for desktop and laptop computers but it is different from a Windows admin password. If you forgot Windows admin password, you need to take use of PCUnlocker Live CD to remove it.

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How to Reset HDD Password on Acer Laptop

March 7th, 2014 by Admin

There are many ways that could be used to password protected a computer or a laptop. You can set a BIOS password or a Windows administrator password to lock your system but these types of protection can be broken easily. BIOS password can be erased by removing the computer’s battery and Windows admin password can be reset with PCUnlocker Live CD.

The most securable method is to set a hard drive password (also known as HDD password). HDD password is stored inside of the hard drive’s firmware area (which is located on the platters). Since the firmware area cannot be read with any widely available software, the password cannot be read or removed. Most modern computers support HDD password. In this tutorial we’ll walk you through the steps of resetting HDD password on Acer laptop.

How to Reset HDD Password on Acer Laptop?

  1. To reset HDD password, you need to boot your laptop in BIOS. Start your Acer laptop and hold on pressing F2 key to access BIOS.
  2. Once you come to the BIOS Setup utility, use the arrow key on the keyword to select Security tab.

    set-hdd-password

  3. On the screen, there are three password protection options: Set Supervisor Password, Set User Password, Set HDD Password and Password on Boot. Move the cursor to Set HDD Password and press Enter.
  4. Enter your current password and set a new HDD password. If you want to remove the HDD password, just left the new password field blank. Confirm your password and save your changes.

    remove-hdd-password

Forgot Your HDD Password and How Can You Remove It?

Forgot your HDD password and can’t remember it? There is no other option but contact your computer manufacturer, send your hard drive to them for accessing the firmware area and remove the password.

However, if you don’t care about the data on your hard drive, pull out the hard drive and put it on as a secondary disk onto another working PC, format your hard drive and connect it back to the original computer and install a fresh copy of Windows again.

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How to Recover Windows Password with Cain & Abel

February 13th, 2014 by Admin

There are chances that you might get locked out of your computer because of forgotten the administrator password. So you then need to find some programs to crack / recover your password. As far as password recovery utilities go, Cain & Abel is by far one of the best freeware out there. This tutorial will walk through recovering Windows 7/Vista/XP password with Cain & Abel.

How to Recover Windows Password with Cain & Abel?

Forgot your administrator password and can’t log in? Cain & Abel needs to be installed, so you must have another working computer to recover your password. First of all, remove the hard drive from your locked machine and then attach it to a working computer as a secondary drive. Then follow these steps to recover Windows password:

  1. Visit the Cain & Abel website and download the Windows NT/2000/XP version of the program. Install the program on your computer. During installation, you’ll also be prompted to install WinPcap, which is fine.
  2. Click on the “Tools” menu and select “Syskey Decoder”. On the Syskey Decoder dialog, click on the “…” button to locate the SYSTEM file of your locked Windows installation. By default, the SYSTEM file is located in C:\Windows\System32\Config. The program will immediately display the decoded boot key which is required for cracking your Windows password.

    decode-syskey

  3. Click on the “Cracker” tab. On the left, click on the “LM & NTLM Hashes” and then click the big blue plus sign on the Cain toolbar. Make sure the “Import Hashes from a SAM database” button is checked. Choose the SAM file of your locked Windows installation and enter the boot key that you’ve got in the step above.

    import-hashes-from-sam

  4. Click Next. All the user accounts will be loaded to the right. Right-click on the user account you need the password for, choose Brute-Force Attack -> NTLM Hashes.
    Cain-Abel-NTLM

  5. Now check predefined under charset and select the suitable dictionary to use and click start.

    brute-force-attack

    That’s it! Just wait for Cain & Abel to recover the password!

If you have no way of getting the SAM and SYSTEM files from your Windows PC, you will not be able to use Cain & Abel to recover your password. If you have no luck with Cain & Abel, I recommend you to use PCUnlocker Live CD which can remove your forgotten Windows password instantly.

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Posted in Free Software, Others, Tips & Tricks, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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How to Reset Windows Server 2012 Password for Hyper-V Generation 2 Virtual Machine

January 24th, 2014 by Admin

Forgot Windows Server 2012 password for your Hyper-V Generation 2 VM? How to reset Hyper-V password without reinstalling your virtual machine?

Starting with Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V provides the options to create a Generation 1 or Generation 2 VM. The former is the same VM type that we have today, whereas Generation 2 VM uses UEFI firmware instead of BIOS and it is only supported by Windows 8 / 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2 as the guest OS.

There are many Windows password recovery tools available on the net but most of them don’t support UEFI booting. When booting Generation 2 VM you may get the error “Boot Failed. EFI SCSI Device.” PCUnlocker is the only software that can support UEFI BIOS and works flawlessly with Hyper-V Generation 2 VM. In this tutorial we’ll walk you through the process of using PCUnlocker to reset lost Windows Server 2012 password for Hyper-V Generation 2 virtual machine.

How to Reset Windows Server 2012 Password for Hyper-V Generation 2 Virtual Machine?

PCUnlocker can run from a UEFI bootable CD or USB flash drive. However, Hyper-V Gen2 VM doesn’t provide a way to boot from a USB drive, and the virtual DVD drive only supports ISO image file. So here we’ll use the ISO image of PCUnlocker to boot a Gen2 VM and then perform the password resetting.

  1. After purchasing the full version of PCUnlocker Enterprise, you’ll receive the download link of PCUnlocker_UEFI_x64.zip, which is about 150 Mb. Unzip the download file and you’ll get an ISO image file called pcunlocker.iso.
  2. Launch Hyper-V Manager. Right-click on the Windows Server 2012 virtual machine that you want to reset lost password for, then select Settings… from the drop-down menu.

    hyper-v-manager

  3. When the Settings dialog box appears, click on the DVD Drive from the Hardware tab. Specify the DVD drive to use the ISO image file of PCUnlocker.

    hyper-v-mount-iso

  4. Switch to the Firmware option under the Hardware tab. Move DVD Drive to the top of startup boot devices. Click on Apply to save your changes.

    hyper-v-boot-from-iso

  5. Start the virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager. It will load the WinPE operating system from the bootable ISO image. After a while, you’ll see the PCUnlocker program.

  6. Simply select your Windows SAM registry hive, the program will display a list of Windows user accounts. Select a user account and click the Reset Password button.
  7. Now you’ve successfully reset Windows Server 2012 password on Hyper-V Gen2 VM. Click the Restart button to reboot the virtual machine. Unmount the ISO file from the virtual machine’s DVD drive and you can then log back into your virtual machine without a password!

Besides resetting Hyper-V Generation 1 and Generation 2 virtual machine password, PCUnlocker can also be used to reset Windows 8/7/Vista/XP passwords for virtual machines running in VMware Workstation, Parallels, VirtualBox, Microsoft Virtual PC, etc.

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How to Fix the Error “Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running”

January 20th, 2014 by Admin

If you have tried to install the Hyper-V component in a VMware virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 or 2012, you probably encountered the following error: “Hyper-V can not be installed: The hypervisor is already running.” which prevents Hyper-V from being installed.

In this article we’ll show you how to fix this issue so you can run the Hyper-V inside your virtual machine. Here are the step-by-step instructions:

  1. Power down the virtual machine that you want to install Hyper-V on.
  2. In the Virtual Machine Settings dialog box, tick the box of “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-v/RVI” to enable the Virtualization engine options.

    enable-vmware-vt

  3. Next you need to find the .vmx configuration file associated with your VMware virtual machine.
  4. Open the .vmx file with any text editor, add the following lines to the end of the VMX file:

    hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”
    mce.enable = “TRUE”
    vhv.enable = “TRUE”

    edit-vmx

Now turn on your virtual machine and install Hyper-V again. This will clear up the message saying that you cannot install Hyper-V because a hypervisor is already running.

Tips: If forgot the login password of a Windows virtual machine (Gen1 & Gen2) running in Hyper-V, you can reset Hyper-V password easily using PCUnlocker.

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Christmas & New Year Offer – 50% Discount on All Our Products

December 31st, 2013 by Admin

To welcome Christmas and New Year, Top Password Software is offering the largest discount coupon for all our products. Customers can save up to 50% on all our products. This promotion will expire at 23:59 UTC, Jan 15th 2014.

Hurry up!!! Shop Now at www.top-password.com

All Products 50% OFF

Coupon Code: TOP-45K2D47BJG

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy-New-Year-2014

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How to Convert YouTube Video to Play on iPhone

December 27th, 2013 by Admin

YouTube has become a favored choice for many iPhone users to enjoy videos online. Have you downloaded lots of YouTube videos and want to watch them on your iPhone while on the move? However, the videos you’ve downloaded from YouTube are not in a supported format for your iPhone. This guide will show you how to convert YouTube video into iPhone supported format using Video Converter Assist, so you take your favorite clips with you wherever your iPhone goes.

How to Convert YouTube Video to Play on iPhone?

Launch the Video Converter Assist program. Click the Add File button to add your YouTube video files into the program. This program supports batch conversion and allows you to convert multiple video files at one time.

Choose the Device mode and then select iPhone option. If you want to play the videos on your iPad, then choose iPad option.

youtube-video-to-iphone

By default the program will use the recommended video settings for the conversion. But if you want to customize the video resolution, frame rate or bitrate, click on Advanced Settings button.

iphone-video-settings

Click the Convert Now! button to begin your conversion. After the video conversion is complete, you can go to the output folder to get the encoded videos which come in the H.264 MP4 format that Apple devices require. Now you can import the converted videos into iTunes to play on your iPhone or just store in iTunes library.

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How to Reset Forgotten SA Password without Stopping SQL Server Instance

November 18th, 2013 by Admin

Forgot your SA password or get locked out of SQL Server? How to connect to SQL Server database in case the ‘BUILTIN\Administrators’ group is removed from SYSADMIN server role? One of my previous articles covers how to recover sa password through single user mode, but that approach requires of restarting your SQL Server instance and causing some downtime. Sometimes this would be unacceptable. In this article we’ll provide you with another way to reset forgotten SA password in SQL Server 2012/2008/2005 without any downtime.

How to Reset Forgotten SA Password without Stopping SQL Server Instance?

  1. To get started, we need to run the SQL Server Management Studio as the system account. This can be done easily with the PsExec program. Download PsExec from Sysinternals website. Extract the PsExec.exe program and save it to a folder on your computer such as C:\.
  2. Open an elevated Command Prompt and run the following command:
    C:\PsExec.exe -s -i "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Ssms.exe"
    Note: Your actual path of SQL Server Management Studio may be different from the one above.
  3. It will start SQL Server Management Studio as the system account. You’ll see that the username is shown as “NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM”. Simply choose the “Windows Authentication” mode and click on the Connect button.

    connect-to-server

  4. Once you connect, in the Object Explorer view, click the plus sign next to Security, and then the plus sign next to Logins. Once expanded, right-click on the SA user, and choose Properties. You can then change the forgotten SA password with a new one.

    reset-sa-password

It is quite common to get locked out of a SQL Server instance, or simply forgot the SA password. With this approach you can reset forgotten SQL Server password easily! Quickly regain access to your SQL Server database without even any downtime.

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