Hey everyone, I have been working on this for days. Im really confused, but let me get to the point. Here is what ive done so far. 1.Booted my windows7 hdd to Kali Linux, mounted the drives. 2. Used samdump2 on The system and sam file to get the hashes. Now i got something like this disabled Administrator, disabled Guest Me:1000:aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee:-45076b3d0847ae6212e48b2896ac3c01::: Ok so Forget the disabled admin and guest im just trying to get the password for "Me" from what i understand the first "aad3b and so on is an LM hash. two repeating chunks max 7 characters each containing only uppercase letter. The second one is an NT hash. So far im correct i think. Now heres where im having problems. When i use john --format=LM /home/kali/Desktop/hashfile I get the SAME THING Me:1000:aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee:-45076b3d0847ae6212e48b2896ac3c01 1 password hashes cracked, 0 left. same thing with john --show --format LM . even when i try to put the output to a john.pot file, it gives me the same thing, for example heres the output for LM in the john.pot $LM$aad3b435b51404ee: same thing with NT $NT$45076b3d0847ae6212e48b2896ac3c01 What exactly is john doing here, It is supposedly "cracking the hashes" all it is doing is reading the first LM and NT hashes that are shown in the hash file. I thought cracking the hash was bruteforcing/wordlist attacks that generated a plaintext password, What am i doing wrong? How can i successfully crack these hashes to get the plaintext password. Any info would be greatly appreciated. If anyone has done this before and understands it and can give me some steps, i would be sooo appreciative. (BTW the second hash is one letter/number different so my password isnt out in the world) Anyone got any ideas/ can explain? Its a windows7 pass