SAMUNLOCK(8) System Manager's Manual SAMUNLOCK(8)

samunlock - unlock users in the SAM user database

samunlock [options] -uuser <samfile>

This manual page documents briefly the samunlock command.

samunlock is a non-interactive command line utility that can unlock a user and/or the user's account bits from the SAM user database file of a Microsoft Windows system (Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, etc.). This file is usually located at \WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM on the file system of a Microsoft Windows Operating System

On success, the program does not output any informatin and the exit code is 0.

Show summary of options.
Unlock the user.
Unlock all the users. If this option is used there is no need to specify the next option.
User to unlock. The user value can be provided as a username, or a RID number in hexadecimal (if the username is preceded with '0x'). Usernames including international characters will probably not work.
Lists the users in the SAM database.
Output human readable output. The program by default will print a parsable table unless this option is used.
Do not allocate more information, only allow the editing of existing values with same size.
Do not expand the hive file (safe mode).
Print debug information of allocated blocks.
Print verbose information and debug messages.

Unlock an user named 'theboss', if found.

Unlock an user with RID '0x3a'.

If the username includes international (non-ASCII) characters the program will not (usually) find it. Use the RID number instead.

chntpwd, reged, samusrgrp
You will find more information available on how this program works, in the text files /usr/share/doc/chntpw/README.txt and /usr/share/doc/chntpw/MANUAL.txt

More documentation is available at the non upstream's author site: https://github.com/rescatux/chntpw

This program was written by Adrian Gibanel Lopez.

This manual page was written by Adrian Gibanel Lopez <adrian15sgd@gmail.com>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

6th December 2017