Cracking a passwd hash using the traditional JohnTheRipper way might take a very long time to accomplish ...
there is also an alternative and faster way of cracking ... by generating rainbow tables ( http://www.antsight.com/zsl/rainbowcrack/ ) ... however .. this requires you to pregenerate the tables on your own first ( it may take years too ).. and it might be worthless if you only need to crack one password ..
but fear not ... RainbowCrack.com ( http://www.rainbowcrack.com/ ) is here for you ... this site is a community based rainbowtable cracking engine .. the only catch is .. you need to generate a 600MB rainbowtable for them and upload it to their server.. after uploading, u are granted access to their rainbowtable cracking engine for 14days ...