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On my windows laptop I get the following message when trying to login:

"the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed"

According to Microsoft I should rejoin the domain - requiring a local admin account. But since, I do not know what local accounts are on the laptop I decided to use a password reset tool.

So I downloaded a bootable USB image from pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd. The boot process however fails with kernel panic:

  1. Booting … <many lines>
  2. Decompressing Linux … Parsing ELF … done
  3. Kernel panic - not synching: No init found. Try passing init = option to kernel

System: Lenovo T450s, CPU i5 5th generation.

Any Idea how to fix it or what other tool works fine?

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  • To me it would seem an easier venture to ask someone for the local password instead. I'm also guessing that since this is a domain handshake failure, you're likely on a work laptop? Jul 5, 2016 at 13:19
  • Yes I am on a work laptop. The company is very little and I am the administrator. And I would like to know a good password reset tool. Maybe a newer kernel could fix the problem.? Jul 6, 2016 at 9:58
  • I used a tool probably even pogostick and it was very easy. Jul 6, 2016 at 10:01

2 Answers 2

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I don't know if it will help other people in the same situation, but I hit this error when using the 2014-02-01 version (cd140201.zip) of ntpasswd (aka "Offline NT Password and Registry Editor"). I tried using an earlier version (cd110511.zip), and that worked for me.

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  • thanks, this worked for me too May 2, 2022 at 16:20
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    I ran into Kernel panic - not synching: No init found when trying to boot from cd140201.zip on Dell T7910 (Windows 10 21H2) yesterday. Next, I tried cd110511.zip - although it booted OK, only USB drives were visible in chntpw. Neither HDDs, attached to the LSI SAS controller, nor NVMe SSDs were visible. The built-in driver installation fixed nothing. I suspect that that's a pretty high chance to run into "outdated drivers" issue with those pogostick images today, thus I'd recommend to simply use chntpw from some alternative liveUSB image.
    – i3v
    Oct 15, 2022 at 20:35
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I just ran into the same issue yesterday, and ended up using chntpw from PartedMagic. Perfectly worked on my Windows 10 21H2, Dell T7910.

Notes:

  1. pogostick is an old bootable USB image with just chntpw tool inside. I assume that the only possible reason for anyone to want to boot pogostick is that they want to run chntpw. But chntpw is available on other liveCD/liveUSB distributions, that are easier to boot.

  2. The pogostick seem to be quite outdated and no longer maintained. Today (2022-10-15), the most recent pogostick release is 2014-02-01.

  3. The http://www.chntpw.com/download/ web page might look a bit more "modern", but it just offers the same files from http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ actually.

  4. The UBCD 5.3.9 contains an old (2013_08_10_i586) version of the Parted Magic distro, and there's chntpw-110511 inside. Newer Parted Magic versions would cost you ~13USD.

  5. It could be a bit tricky to boot those outdated Parted Magic sometimes, but there's a number of pre-defined boot modes, and one of the "failsafe" modes always works for me up until now (which one depends on a particular hardware). Newer Parted Magic versions should be less tricky to boot.

  6. Inside the graphical Parted Magic environment, there's a "Start -> System Tools -> Change Windows Password" tool, that should, theoretically, run chntpw. However, it does not work for me - it was always unable to find my Windows installation. I ended up using CLI instead.

  7. Yesterday, I used Parted Magic 2022_01_18 (just because I had it at hand), not the UBCD 5.3.9 version (even though UBCD should have worked just as well, theoretically).

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