A friend of mine is unable to get into his computer. On Windows XP, he says that he downloaded a security update. The next time he turned on his computer however, the Welcome screen came up asking for his password. The thing is, he hasn't set a password, or if he did, it was so long ago, and he hasn't used it since, that he's forgotten it. He's tried everything he can think of as the password, and sems to have exhausted that possibility.

How else can he get into his computer?

Tell him to write no password at all, just hit enter... it's worth a shot.

Believe me, we tried that ;)

<span style="color: lightblue">Is the drive NTFS or FAT32? And do you feel lucky?

He doesn't know...

Is there any way to check?

The password's "ABC1234".


[img]tongue.gif[/img]


...Get a tech to have look at it or something.

<span style="color: lightblue">Easiest way to check is to assume it's FAT32, treat it like it's FAT32, and call it NTFS when this fails. Ergo, download this file (courtesy of www.bootdisk.com ), put a floppy disk into your drive, and run the executable (from wherever you downloaded it. Don't bother putting it on the disk first). Take the disk out, write protect it, and stick it in your friend's computer. Turn that computer on. All going well (read: the drive being FAT32), you should end up at a command line. From there you should be able to do one of two things: a) back up or b) steal the password file .

The link to the file doesn't work. And if its NTFS, I'll have to reinstall XP right?

<font color=silver>Callum - Try restarting the machine in safe mode and resetting the password through the Administrator account.

With a little luck, you should be able to take care of things following the instructions here: How to log on to Windows XP if you forget your password or your password expires - This article is from the Microsoft knowledge base.

I remember on the old computers at my school, to bypass the password log in, you just pressed Alt+F4.

Ahh the times of top notch security eh?