Yes, that's a very descriptive title, isn't it

Now let me describe this in detail: what I need is a BootCD similar to ERD-Commander, which means it needs to attach itself to the existing installation on the harddrive in order to manipulate its settings. In particular, create a new local user which is an administrator (and delete this user afterwards).
Sounds like being a script kiddie in need of some hacking tool? Well, I'm not. Thing is, I'm workstation administrator for a large company which decided to remove all of the local admin-accounts from all the PCs in the domain. I can still administrate the PCs as long as they are connected to the network but there's no way to administrate a local PC any more (for example if it got kicked out of the domain or contains a virus). That's quite annoying, as there are situations when you need to logon temporary.

So what I need is a way to boot a (legal) CD, connect to the installation, add this user and boot into the local installation. Any ideas, suggestions, solution if it's possible and where to start?

For a corporate environment I would look at MS DART ( successor to Sysinternals ERD ):

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterpris...ducts/dart.aspx

You can use this tool to create a local administrator from a PE booted CD:

http://www.kood.org/windows-password-renew/

A couple of preliminary questions:

Is the large company so poor that it cannot afford to buy existing Commercial Software (ERD comes into mind )?

Are the large company executives so dumb as to decide to remove all local admin-accounts from all the PC without consulting the internal workstation administrator / IT people and without providing an alternate method to repair/troubleshoot/mantain a not-connected-to the-domain workstation?

jaclaz

Many companies are paranoid about security these days especially those that got burnt by large credit card details thefts. Typical question we get is - we uninstalled windows component X why is your software no longer working?

I could request it but I have ERD and ERD doesn't offer an option to do what I want. So I didn't even think of its successor...


Exactly. And it was a global decision, and no, they don't ask the market's support team before they do (annoying) global decisions. We just have to live with it. It's political stuff.
The alternative way to repair those workstations is re-imaging. Which I want to avoid...

Thanks for this Password Renew Tool @paraglider, I'll give it a try

Yep, sorry , I was thinking of MSDART and wrote ERD. (I guess the age is showing, I simply cannot stand changing the names....).

jaclaz