
When installing Cygwin generally you can just use defaults and whatever local mirror you fancy however when the list of tools is shown search for OpenCL and add this to the installation.Īdd the highlighted component to the install and continue and you should find you will soon have a Linux installation in a folder on your PC (default location is C:\cygwin64\ ). Next go ahead and download Cygwin ( ) this is basically a miniature Linux platform on Windows which lets you compile Linux programs to run under Windows if they are compiled for it. The remainder up to the colon is the hashed password which is what needs to be guessed so now we have the right file. The next bit ‘ THMmaDC5 ‘ is the ‘salt’ value which is random data used to encode the password as the hash making it more difficult to guess. The $6$ in this case identifies the password hash as being sha512crypt format but yours may differ, the options are: The data should look more like this (I have cropped out some of the line to avoid it filling the screen. Luckily in windows this doesn’t make much difference so we can just open it.


The structure of this file is very similar to ‘passwd’ but in Linux has different permissions. That elsewhere is a file in the same location called ‘shadow’. The X is where the hash would have been found historically but when the security was updated this method was changed and so the X just shows that there is a password configured but it’s stored elsewhere. Open it in notepad or similar and it is highly likely you will see a series of lines line this: In Linux passwords were historically stored in a hashed form in root/etc/ in a file named passwd so this is the first place to look.

Now that problem out the way we needed to find the password file. It worked perfectly and after giving a list of available drives you can double click and mount the drive as a drive letter in Windows then just browse to it like any other drive. After a bit of research I found a free program called Ext Volume Manager and gave it a go. I recently needed to recover passwords from a Linux system where I had the drive which I could connect to a Windows PC but this presented several issues starting with finding the right file then what tools to use and most importantly how to mate it correctly in OpenCL mode to get the benefit of graphics card processing power!įirstly the drive was formatted as EXT3 which Windows doesn’t natively support.
