My daughter has managed to lock herself out of her laptop, :headvswal any way of getting back into it without losing the data on the hard drive..the password before windows starts. :rant:

 

cheers Paul

Hi,

 

Do you mean the bios password or thw windows password?

 

Vijay

Hi,

 

Do you mean the bios password or thw windows password?

 

Vijay

 

Hi Vijay, it's the windows password.

 

Paul

What versions of windows are we talking?

 

In theory there isnt, without breaking the security. Now there are ways of rewriting the security ID's from outside of windows, which would allow you access to the filles, however this tends to ruin the installation of windows, or at least the user account. if there is another user account on the laptopt hen you could try this method and see your luck. Basically searching through google should find you something, although you will have to be fairly PC literate to be able to sort it - be prepared for muchos buggering about...

 

Alternativly, and probably the easiest way would be to remove the laptops hard drive, mount it in a 2.5" caddy and hook it up to another PC.. thats all well and good however you may still not be able to access the files.

 

The next trick is then to adjust the user permissions within windows for the files on the hard disk, now you normally have to take ownership of the files with an administrator account (depends what level of user she was on her own laptop really) however if she had the laptop as part of a domain network (getting complex i know...) i.e. at a uni, or large company etc then you may need to take ownership of the files as a network administrator, or a domain administrator (different class of user than normal "administrator")... which is difficult to do at home, although now the data is portable in the 2.5" caddy you can at least easily take it to someone who may be able to sort that out for you.

boot up into safe mode

 

select the administrator account

 

9/10 times these aren't password protected

 

if that doesnt work the next step is this

 

http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/

 

works 100% of the time for me, you may need to run a chkdsk first if it tells you it has mounted the NTFS partition as readonly because of a bad flag on the FS