I have a netbook I'm trying to get access into

It doesn't have a CD drive and its boot menu options are Hard Drive, Floppy Drive, USB CD Drive...my only USB CD Drive is from a dell laptop that has a proprietary USB plug so I can't just boot off a Windows CD, reformat and install a fresh copy of Windows...I have a USB Floppy Drive, but can't find any Win/DOS 3.5" disks and when I plug in the USB Floppy drive without any disks I don't get any "please insert a disk" errors, it just boots right to XP...I also tried plugging in a couple flash/external USB hard drives which weren't recognized so I can't boot off of one of those either

Also the BIOS is password protected, so I don't know if a USB CD-ROM drive option is even enabled

I do have a USB-HDD adapter which I was able to use to pull up the drive on another computer as a slave drive, so I'm hoping theres something I can do in the registry or some type of configuration file I can overwrite to reset or display the password. Normally I'd do a Shift-F10 during Windows repair installation and command prompt to 'control userpasswords2' and reset the PW that way, but again theres no built-in CD drive and I don't have an external CD drive

Any ideas? Btw, this isn't a stolen computer or anything like that, it was left over from a job from about 5 years ago and I'm just curious to mess around with it...Fujitsu Lifebook P Series with touchscreen and built-in wifi

Thanks

12/20/2012 6:57:38 PM

CTRL-ALT-DEL

12/20/2012 7:41:41 PM

Just pull the hard drive and load it up in an enclosure so you can browse from another PC.

Or see if you can get KonBoot or Hiren's Boot CD to load from a bootable USB drive. One will get you in, the other has several ways to get you in.

12/20/2012 7:57:17 PM

I used to use ERD Commander get past (read: reset) windows passwords, but since you can't boot to CD or flash drive I'm out of ideas to get past a Windows password. I don't know of a way to hack in when the drive mounted as an external drive, but perhaps someone else does.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460909.aspx


Outside of getting a standard external CD drive, I would yank the hard drive if you're trying to preserve the data, put a different one in, and install Windows from scratch.

I would imagine there's a way to reset the BIOS settings/password with a jumper or something...look into it.

Lastly perhaps there is something worthwhile here: http://tinyurl.com/d48lx7e

12/20/2012 7:57:54 PM

^^i did pull the hard drive and connect it to one of my laptops via usb and was able to browse it all...but i dunno what to edit

^i'll check those links out...and i dont really care about any of the data, aside from proper drivers for the hardware

12/20/2012 8:01:03 PM

If you don't care about the data just install Windows from scratch, and download drivers from dell. As a bonus you'll be dealing with a fresh OS, and it doesn't even take that much time. (or maybe that last link might help you hack in)

12/20/2012 8:04:22 PM

i was able to download the USB#####.zip file from http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ and extract all the files to a flash drive, which I booted my laptop off of with the hard drive in question connected via USB enclosure, and I was able to clear out the password!

12/20/2012 10:00:03 PM

I was about to suggest deleting the SAM file (which holds all the passwords) and making a new profile.

12/20/2012 11:54:32 PM

ntpasswd

12/20/2012 11:59:31 PM

^http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Works like a charm

12/21/2012 2:07:50 PM