erasing linux passwords also

I actually forgot my root password on a debian linux, for real! I was actually able to reset the root password on my the linux also pretty easily. I had to boot into single user mode, by way of the grub command line, add the option (see in the picture where it says press e to edit? add this onto the end)

single init=/bin/bash

apparently, it skipped loading the operating system or something, gave me a root shell in single user mode, butthen I was getting the error 'Authentication token lock busy' trying to reset the password. presumably this was because it was read only, so in the bash shell entered

mount -o remount,rw /

this made gave me read-write and then I was able to I was then able to reset the password using the passwd program like normally. wow.

erasing windows passwords

I thought that to fix a windows computer if you've forgotten a password, you needed to like recover the sam file (using like a recovery disk) and crack the password hashes using a program, some complicated process! It turns out that it is actually very simple to just clear the password on the passworded account using a boot disk, without harming anything, using the offline nt password editor - http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

you burn the boot disk image to a cd using nero or some other program, and the boot disk automatically detects hard drive partitions with windows installed, and the accounts on the computer, and erases the password on the given accounts. It has lots of automatic and default options and is absolutely easy to use, you just literally hit enter a couple times and it will erase the password for you to login to an admin account. too easy

xkcd lols