Access User Account from another Hard Drive

[Hawaiian2002]

Aloha,

I do some computer repairs for certain clients and I have a little problem. My client has an emachine that is inoperable. He needs some file from his hard drive. I grab the hard drive and stick it in another computer to access the files but I cannot get into his user account. I see his name and when I go to properties it shows 0(zero)K. He said that it his account is password protected. I have his password but I am not able to input it anywhere. Is there any way to input his password and get to his files? I have tried to place his hard drive in other computers, loaded in safe mode, etc but I all I get is the BSOD.

 

[Hawaiian2002]

bump

 

[Hawaiian2002]

Found it. Here is the answer.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=810881

It is actually unnverving that you can have your user account password protected and have someone else grab your hard drive and reveal all your contents from another computer. My case is legit but this seems to be a flaw.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Originally posted by: Hawaiian2002
Found it. Here is the answer.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=810881

It is actually unnverving that you can have your user account password protected and have someone else grab your hard drive and reveal all your contents from another computer. My case is legit but this seems to be a flaw.

You'll note that that solution requires Administrator access. This is why people who leave their generic Administrator account password blank = screwed by the system.

 

[Netopia]

I've got a potentially easier way.

I'm going to have to make an assumption here:

You (as a tech) have a laptop of some sort OR that the company you are in has some sort of FTP server OR the company has Windows machines that are sharing folders and you know the admin password.

Anyway, first download OverClockix (which is a bootable live Linux CD based on Knoppix, which is based on Debian). You can grab the bittorrent here and their page is here. (I'm sure this can be done with other distros, but I'm familiar with this one).

Boot from the CD (takes a while). Once you are to the desktop, open a terminal and run gftp and connect to the FTP server of your choice (assuming you've got DHCP running.. if not, configure the network).

You'll notice that on the desktop are icons of every hard drive partition on the computer, and they are all already mounted (including NTFS partitions). Simply click on a partition, navigate to the files you want and send them via FTP to your upload spot.

You could also mount windows shares using SAMBA and then copy them to those windows shares.

Either way, I've found it to be a valuable to for getting files from NTFS partitions when the OS has gone belly up.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

It is actually unnverving that you can have your user account password protected and have someone else grab your hard drive and reveal all your contents from another computer.

Once you have the machine physically you can do whatever you want. Even simpler I could bootup a Knoppix CD and not need any username or password to get to the data, that's why you have to be very carefull what important data you keep on laptops and you really should encrypt it if possible.