Hi.
I'm aware that this will sound dodgy. All I can do is say that it's not, and I'm not using an alt.
If you're not comfortable with that, then please feel free not post.
My Grandfather just passed away, and my mother (his daughter) needs to get into his laptop for reasons you can probably imagine. He was alway very sharp, and had begun utilising the internet a lot in the later years.
So, he had a spam problem a wee while back and in his ignorance, put a login password on the machine.
Can anyone point me to a "how to" to get into the machine?
It would be greatly appreciated. I'm not in the same country, but can either talk someone over there through it, or use logmein with my uncles machine if it requires the setup of a disk or something...
Posts
If the drive is encrypted, then you are really entering some territory where its hard to not misuse the answers (and they're complicated to boot) so you're on your in that case.
Its more to capture family snaps/histories. And to be honest, if it came down to having to remove a HD, my family probably wouldn't bother.
Alternatively you can go the "hacking" direction but it get's complicated and possible time consuming. Since you're only looking for some files and it's very unlikely the disc is encrypted I would not recommend going this route.
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/
EDIT: You can grab Ubuntu here, and if you follow the steps it'll show exactly how to make a USB stick that it'll run from. You'll need to change the boot order of your granddad's laptop to boot from USB before the HDD, but that's fairly trivial and covered in the steps on that site. The only thing that might not work off the bat is the wireless card, but for simple file transfer that won't be necessary.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
Take the HDD out and put it in a USB dock.
No need to fumble around with cracking his password.
We're all sorted. We really appreciate the help.