Hi, Have an old desktop running Windows Home Premium. I password protected it but now can’t remember it. It’s not one of my usual recycled passwords either. I want to double check the hard drive as I think there are some family photos and other nice to have things on there that I don’t have backed up.
Any help would be appreciated!
If all you really want is your old family photos and documents, you could pull your hard drive out of the PC and hook it up to another.
If you don’t want to tear apart the PC, there are password recovery/reset apps out there that you can use. I don’t have any direct experience with them, so there isn’t any one in particular that I can recommend.
You could also make a bootable USB drive or DVD. Ubuntu probably has such a portable version available and instructions on how to prep the media somewhere obvious on their webpage. Boot the computer off the removable media, then browse the hard drive to see what’s there.
The Offline NT Password Editor, from http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/, will do what you want. You will need to download and burn it to a CD and boot the laptop from it.
That worked for me when I had the same problem (lost Vista admin password).