In “Vista Password Recovery Helps Widow“, Tim Fehlman of Daily Cup of Tech describes how he helped a window gain access to her late husband’s Vista laptop without knowing any of the passwords.
The Problem
The widow came to Tim for help obtaining files from a Vista laptop owned by her husband, who had recently passed away and did not leave behind a list of his passwords. Booting into Safe Mode with F8 was disabled, and Tim would not be able to use a Linux boot disc to read from the hard drive.
Breaking & Entering
The problem was solved by booting XP with Bart PE and then cracking each user account’s password. Tim was able to get XP running since the laptop’s RAID drivers were available online from Dell. Once up and running, ophcrack did the job of obtaining each user account’s password.
Read the full article for a complete rundown of the operation, which ends with a few helpful tips for keeping your system secure.
