Forcing Remote machine to serve RDP (or similar) session

Question

Due to a Dell/Nvidia design flaw in the Dell Inspiron 1420 series, my laptop no longer shows a display. I am looking for a solution to view it remotely. I have used it via RDP in the past (not for a year though) however for what ever reason I can no longer RDP, it could have been disabled some how. However, I'm on the same LAN, I can ping it, and know its login creditials.

Is there a way I can hack into it remotely to force it to serve a RDP session or an alternative?

Please bear in mind my only view I could have to its interface is via a remote session. Its running Windows 7 Pro

Answer 1

Depending how your firewall was set up, you could try PSEXEC from a computer on the same local network. It can open a cmd prompt on the remote computer and allows you to remote execute any program/script/dos cmd (even copy an app over and then execute it).

>psexec \\remote-computer\c$ -u ausername - apwd cmd

If you can connect then you can use the following to "Enable" / "Disable" RDP from that remote cmd prompt: Enable Remote Desktop Over a Network On Demand

Here are the bat scripts from that link:

# To enable Remote Desktop
@reg add "\\%1\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" 
  /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

# To disable Remote Desktop
@reg add \\%1\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server 
  /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

# To check whether a computer has Remote Desktop enabled
@reg query "\\%1\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" 
  /v fDenyTSConnections

To execute a bat remotely, create .bat file and add one of the above cmds to it. Move that .bat file to c:/ and open a cmd prompt and type the following:

>psexec \\remote-computer -u ausername -p apwd -d -c -f c:\yourbat.bat