There are plenty of bootable utilities out there that will let you reset his password as long as the bios doesn't have a password and the drive isn't encrypted. Someone suggested on here a while back that's Linux based, can't find it now but I've used it a ton of times on users personal machines.
________________________________ From: Len Hammond [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 3:45 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Latitude access problem Dell Latitude Genuises: Just had a call from a customer. He decided to set an account password on his Latitude laptop three days ago. He did this after drinking a bottle of wine, and now he can't remember his password. He either typed it wrong twice when setting it or doesn't remember it. Either way he can't get into his machine. He also doesn't remember or can't figure out what the Admin password is either. He does own the box and apparently he recently talked with Dell about this specific Service Tag to get drivers for a refresh. This is the box he has been using for some class he is taking so he needs to get the data off of it. It runs fine, he just can't get into it. He can pull the HDD and put it in an external case and attach it to another machine to grab the data before he wipes and reinstalls the OS. I have never tried to "repair" an operating system installation to reset passwords and I really think that will not work. Anyway, he is going to try a repair before he pulls the drive and recovers his data and then rebuilds. I believe that there are no viruses involved, but it did sound like alcohol was involved <grin>. Anyone have any thoughts, I can try or pass on to him? Len Hammond CSI:Hartland [email protected] ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
