Just yesterday I tried out what will likely remain one of my favorite tools; URL=http://www.winternals.com]ERD Commander 2003[/URL].

It all began with a call that's usually just an annoyance. A forgotten password on a winxp pro box being used as a file server. First thought, lopht crack, simple, as elegant as can be expected. I remember reading about ERD Commander several months ago however. If you haven't heard of it, it's great. The tool I used called locksmith let's you simply reset the password to whatever you want. If you don't care what the password is, this is great, and takes less than 5 minutes total. Locksmith is only one of many tools that comes with it though.

The thing that sold me however, was the emergency download possibiltity. you can download it with an unlimited 5 day use license and then convert that license for 1 named machine. Nice, considering the client was interested in the 1 machine license and thus footed the bill.

It works by way of a bootable cd. When you download it, you download a tool that custom tailors a CD image for you based on any special drivers you need. It even let's you include any extra files you think you may need. Then it boots up as windows xp pro right off the cd. Pretty slick if you ask me. Your greeted with an explorer interface and the registry, disks, services and filesystem of the host box are all configurable from the ERD Commander interface.

Well this is starting to sound like an ad or something so I'll stop now but it's really cool. I'd imagine it could also be easlily abused. You can set a password for the disk when your creating the image, but I'm sure that could be circumvented fairly easily. Of course any system that is open enough to be booted off CD is gone anyways so perhaps that's not such an issue.