Information Technology, Information Security and Governance

Forgot your Windows 7 Password?? No Worries

2013-09-04T14:14:00.001-05:00

I understand that sometimes it is a nightmare when you cannot access your Windows 7 computer. Now there are a couple of things you need to understand and need. This method will only work if:

- You didn’t have any disk encryption program installed like McAfee or Symantec or others and,
- You have a Windows 7 boot CD

While on your log in screen, you will notice that if you hit the “Shift” key 5 times, you will get this

Now, our intention is to replace the sticky keys with a command prompt. The reason is very simple - So you can type the password reset command.

Here we go with the reset process:

1. Insert the Windows disk and boot your computer off the disk. Go through the options until you get to the installation screen.

2. Click on the “Repair your computer” option as shown below

3. Proceed to the repair option screen and select “Command Prompt” Please also take note of the drive letter where your Operating System in installed

4. Once the command prompt page loads, proceed with backing up the sticky keys files by running the command

copy Z:\windows\system32\sethc.exe Z:\
where Z is the drive letter of the OS location.

5. Now copy the cmd.exe executable to replace the sticky key file. Here’s the command

copy Z:\windows\system32\cmd.exe Z:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
again where Z is the drive letter of the OS location.

6. You can now reboot your computer from the hard drive.

7. When you get to the login prompt, hit the “Shift” key five time and the command prompt screen will pop up.
8. The password reset command is in the format

net user username password

so if we wanted to reset the password for user John Doe with username jdoe and a new password of P@55word, it will be net user jdoe P@55word

With your new password set, you should be able to now log in. It is advisable you remember to boot again from your Windows 7 disk and copy the sticky key file back to its original location. The command will be

copy Z:\sethc.exe Z:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

where Z is drive letter where the OS is installed

I hope this hack can come in handy to you.

iOS 7 beta on iPhone 5

2013-06-17T11:21:00.001-05:00

I have been testing iOS7 beta on the iPhone 5 Model A1429. Here are a few things I haven’t been able to get them to work.

IOS7 now has a Blocked list setting. You will not receive phone calls, messages, or FaceTime from people on the block list (in theory). FYI, this feature is already available when you jailbreak your iPhone with apps like iBlacklist. I tested this feature with the iOS7 beta and here’s what I noticed

- Messages didn’t come through from the block number.

- Calls came through but no records of missed calls showed up in recent calls from that number. Most importantly, we don’t want any calls coming through.

- There’s still no option for autoreply with custom text messages for your contacts.

The next thing I have come across that is an issue for me but not so much for others is the ability to accept the installation of a wireless certificate.

I was under the impression that iOS7 will greatly increase battery performance. Unless it was the combination of my downloading of multiple apps and using a LTE connection, the battery was draining faster than I’d imagine. Plus, the phone was getting way too hot for my liking. Hopefully, they will take care of this issue.

To get to the spotlight search page, swipe your home screen downwards.

To close your running apps, hit the home button twice, then swipe the page you intend to close upwards.

The weather app is still a static image while the clock is not.

Will continue the testing while hoping that iOS7 lives up to the hype.

Microsoft Cryptography and Digital Certificate Update

2013-06-13T08:46:00.001-05:00

On June 11, 2013, Microsoft released update that improves Cryptography and Digital Certificate handling in Windows. This update should allow administrators to:

- Configure domain-joined computers to use auto update without having access to the Windows Update site. This applies to updates for both trusted and disallowed CTLs.

- Configure domain-joined computers to independently opt in to auto update for both trusted and disallowed CTLs.

- Examine the set of roots in Microsoft root programs and to choose a subset of them for distribution via Group Policy.

For the full article go here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2854544

Downgrading Windows 8 to Windows 7

2013-05-22T10:02:00.000-05:00

Whenever I come accross a computer issue, I find it helpful to share my experience with others. Recently I was going through the process of downgrading Windows 8 to Windows 7. Now before you start thinking of popping in your Windows 7 disk, you have to understand the critical difference between the hard drive partition styles for both OS. Windows 8 uses a GPT partition style and Windows 7 uses MBR style. If you don’t understand the differences, click here

In order to achieve installing your Windows 7 on your new computer preloaded with Windows 8, follow the steps below.

1. On your Win 8, go to Settings -> PC Settings –> General –> Advance Startup and restart (this is to enter Windows 8 boot option menu which can also be achieve by holding the shift key while restarting or run the command line switch shutdown /r /o)

2. When you get to the UEFI BIOS page where you see Choose an Option, go to Troubleshooting -> UEFI Firmware Settings

3. When you get to the traditional BIOS screen, you want to enable Legacy Boot which by default is disabled. You can now set your Legacy Boot device priority from CD/DVD to Internal Drive etc.

After settings are saved and computer is restarting, your Windows 7 process should initiate. There’s one more step to be performed before the installation can proceed. Remember out GPT vs MBR partition style mentioned above? We will need to take care of that for the installation to proceed. When your installation screen gets to the select drive to install windows page, you will notice that you get an error that says windows cannot be installed on selected drive. If you expand the error to view details, it reads “Windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of GPT Partition style”. What we need to do next is bring the GPT partition to MBR partition. Here are the steps to achieve that

1. While on the select drive screen, hit SHIFT – F10. This should bring up the console

2. Type diskpart

3. Once in diskpart, type:

a. List disk (this should display all the disk available)

b. Select disk n (where n is the disk you want to connect to from the list)

c. Convert mbr (this is usually quick. The result will let you know if it was able to convert or not. If the command was not successful then next step)

d. Clean (this is takes a little longer than convert but for a new computers, it shouldn’t take long)

e. Quit.

4. Continue with the installation process.

Taking the above steps should permit a clean install for Windows 7. Please share, ask questions and post comments if you have any. If you encountered any issues, it will be nice to share it with the public.

Thank you,

Exchange Management Console 2010 Initialization Failed

2013-03-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

I am sure like me, a good number of Exchange 2010 administrators out there have had sleepless nights trying to figure out what is wrong with the new exchange 2010 server.

Recently, I was in the process of upgrading Exchange 2010 SP2 to SP3. After digesting Exchange 2010 SP3 release notes, I started the upgrading process.

Everything installed just fine. No scary errors found in the logs. restarted the exchange server and everything was fine.

When I launched the Exchange management console and get a big error "Unable to open Exchange Management Console - Initialization Failed"

The attempt to connect to http://exch.company.local/poweshell using 'Kerberos' authentication failed: Connecting to the remote server failed with the following error message: WinRM cannot process the request. The following error occurred while using Kerberos authentication: The network path was not found....

You are responsible for all configurational changes made on your exchange server

If you come across this error, please follow the following steps

1. In your powershell prompt, run WinRM quickconfig hit enter and accept the changes.

2. Run iisreset

Go back to your console and click retry. If it doesn't work, then follow the next steps below

1. Launch IIS Manager

2. Expand the server -->; Sites -->; Default Web Site -->; click on PowerShell

3. Under Powershell modules, make sure kerbauth module is enabled, module type is Native and Entry Type is Local. If it is not there, then enable it or register and enable it.

After completing the steps above, go back to your powershell prompt and restart iis by running command 2 above.

If still no success, then we will have to get into some more config files details.

To do that, confirm the following

1. The "Authenticated Users" group is added to the security property of your ClientAccess folder in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14

2. Browse to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\PowerShell

3. Make a back up of the web.config file (always make a backup before making any changes in a config file)

4. Open the file, find and replace file:///%ExchangeInstallDir% with file:///C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14 at this stage, we are replacing the environmental variable found in the system properties with an absolute path. If for some reason your system couldn't call the variables, then this should take care of the problem.

5. Save the file and run iisreset

That should definitely take care of your console initialization failure.

If this problem helped you resolved your issue, please drop comments. If you have updates, also feel free to contribute.