Rescue Kit: Trinity Home

What is the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK)?

www.trinityhome.org

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.

- Easily reset windows passwords with the improved winpass tool
- Simple and easy menu interface
- 5 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability
- Full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g
- Winclean, a utility that cleans up all sorts of unnecessary temporary files on your computer.
- Clone computers over the network via multicast.
- Wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.35 )
- Contributed backup utility called "pi", to automate local machine backups
- Easy script to find and mount all local filesystems
- Self update capability to include and update all virusscanners + local changes you made to TRK.
- Full proxyserver support.
- Run a samba fileserver (windows like filesharing)
- Run a ssh server
- Recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
- Recovery of lost partitions
- Evacuation of dying disks
- Full read/write and rpm support
- UTF-8 international character support (select keyboard language from the scrollable textmenu at startup)
- 2 rootkit detection uitilities
- Most software updated to recent versions
- Literally thousands of changes and bugfixes since version 3.3
- Elaborated documentation, including manpages for all commands (also TRK 's own)

Today we will look at Winpass and Winclean. 




Winpass

Winpass is a utility within the TRK that allows you to reset or change passwords on MS Windows while offline. 

Complete instructions on how to use Winpass can be found here.

My video tutorial can be here.

I began by setting a password on my administrator account. I did a quick restart to ensure the password was in place. I then booted into the TRK and opened the command prompt and typed "winpass" to mount the filesystems.

I then typed "1" and hit enter to initiate the utility. From here we can see a list of usernames. By default it will select the Administrator account. You can also use the command (winpass -u "John Doe") to select another user. 

Then type "1" and hit enter to clear the users password. We can see that the password was cleared. 

After a quick reboot, I was able to log right into Windows 7 without having to enter a password!



Winclean

Winclean is a utility within the TRK that can be used to clean up junk files from a Windows installation such as temp files or the contents of recycling bins. 

Complete instruction on how to use Winclean can be found here. 

After booting into the TRK and bringing up a command line, simply type "winclean" to produce the following prompt: 

Simply type "y" and hit enter. The utility will work for a moment and then produce the following output shown below summarizing the Filesystem usage before and after the cleanup. In the screenshot below, you can see that I did gain some free space. 

Since this is a VM that has hardly been used, there was very little to clean. Using Windclean on much older machines that may have been used for years will likely show a greater degree of freed up space.