Wonderful/Dangerous tool - ERD Commander

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 :D so perhaps that's not such an issue.

its price is not too cheap lol, but if It can do what it says it can, i can see that being added to my Collection. I'm wondering if its emergency download is available for free, and then u get charged after you sign up for the license. I'm not sure if my job will pay for it this time (They already paid for LC4). Maybe when I get out of dept i'll invest into it. One more question, does it have a free lifetime update with the purchase? I dont want to pay each time a new update comes up :). I'd surf around their site but i'm running out of time right now. Thanx for the link...looks like a really nice tool.

ultimate boot disk does that and more, It is my favorite tool, comes as a bootable cd, and includes tons of options such as Resets Windows Passwords, Restores System Files.
Installs Windows Faster, Identifies PC Hardware, Extracts Windows CD files, Troubleshoots Startup Errors, Clones Drives or Partitions, Streamlines the Registry, Optional Virus Scanner, etc. you can get it free at http://www.startdisk.com/

But:

CAUTION: The Ultimate Boot Disk is for personal computers running Windows 95, 98 or ME.

if thats the case its pretty usless too me. but it sure would be nice if i missed something and they have a version that works with xp and 2k thats free. free is good!

every time i see your sig a have to laugh because i remember doing that with vi!

the password reset is NTpassword, which I know for a fact works on 2000 and XP, I dont really use the rest much, for that I usually use a copy of windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) but if the rest of the disk is like password reset, it does work for XP and 2k.