Reboot remote system without using shutdown.exe

Question

In Windows XP, is there a way to reboot a remote system without using shutdown.exe?

Target system is also Windows XP, and access via RDP is available. I do have local administrative privileges on the box, but for some reason can't run shutdown.exe.

I know certain tasks such as logoff and others can be done with rundll32, but I'm not sure what (if any) the syntax would be to use it for shutdown or reboot.

Answer 1

You can run shutdown from your own machine, so it shouldn't matter if it's available on the remote machine or not.

shutdown \\computername /r /t:5 "Your computer is shutting down in 5 seconds. Bye." /y /f

/r is for reboot
/t:X is "Shutdown in X seconds"
/y is "Answer yes to everything"
/f is "Force"

Answer 2

Supposedly, there was a remote terminal shutdown utility in windows 2000 that might work on win XP. It's called TSSHUTDN. There is also a sysinternals tool called Psshutdown. I've added in some Google results below.

Windows KB Article on it

XP Pro Documentation Hosted by Microsoft

Tech net article talking about different shutdown tools

I have not tested any of these solutions.

Hope this helps

Answer 3

You can reboot the computer by creating and running this VBScript on the remote computer:

set objwmiservice = getobject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate,(Shutdown)}\\.\root\cimv2") 
set coloperatingsystems = objwmiservice.execquery ("select * from Win32_OperatingSystem") 
for each objoperatingsystem in coloperatingsystems 
    objoperatingsystem.Win32Shutdown(2) 
next

Script source, Win32Shutdown documentation