As many of you are now aware, my brother passed away a few days ago. His laptop computer contains his banking and bill paying records, and his wife needs to access it, but it is password protected, and she has no idea what it is! I have been trying all sorts of things based on the password hint given, but to no avail.

Is there any way to break into this thing without figuring out the actual password, as it doesn’t appear he wrote it down anywhere?

Thanks in advance!!!

You can reset the password with a boot disk here:
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/

Download and burn it to CD and boot to it.

Yes, Hirens is the way to go. Find out what to do with it here.

Your other avenue of attack is data recovery. This involves removing the hard drive and plugging it into a data recovery system. This can cost you a lot of money.

If worse comes to worst, and you need DR, I know a guy...

H&K-Guy

Thanks!

Follow Stoic-one's advise -

Add it to a USB stick if you have bootable choices, it is a very handy utility.

You could pull the drive and use a USB container if the files are common - Excel, Word or even something you could import.

My recommendation is to always duplicate the disk before trying to get into it--just in case, you know?

First:
Bronicabill, condolences. Dealing with a loss that close is painful. Then there is the business end of it as well, while you are grieving.

Second:
This should be a sticky PSA somewhere.
Most of have stuff we keep in safes. Most of us practice just a little more Op-Sec than “regular” folks.
Somebody in your life needs to be trusted enough to have a copy of passwords, combinations, etc. for WHEN something like this happens.

That being said...I’m one of the worlds worst about thinking I’m gonna live forever.

7 Free Windows Password Recovery Tools

I've used the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor tool multiple times at work. It never let me down. YMMV.

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
Most of have stuff we keep in safes. Most of us practice just a little more Op-Sec than “regular” folks.

Yup. Where my sensitive stuff is stored I doubt anybody's going to be getting to it w/o the pass phrase in any reasonable time.

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
Somebody in your life needs to be trusted enough to have a copy of passwords, combinations, etc. for WHEN something like this happens.

A friend of mine passed away with everything sensitive in a keyring. His family thought they knew the pass phrase. Oops. Asked a buddy and me to try to crack it. I beat the livin' bejesus out of that keyring with multiple automated tools, and I even had viable hints to narrow the field. And wrote software to generate guesses from the hints using typical obfuscation techniques. Created keyspaces with, literally, billions of entries. No go. Let the cracking algorithms use those as merely hints, from which to expand the guesses. Still no joy.

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
That being said...I’m one of the worlds worst about thinking I’m gonna live forever.

I haven't shared mine because it has work-related stuff on it. If my ex-employer would ever stop calling me for help, long past my retirement, I could dump that stuff, then I could give my wife my pass phrase.

They're beginning to annoy me.

Is the information on the computer or did he use the computer to access the information on his bank's website?

All of our bill pay and banking information is stored on our bank's servers, not my computer so accessing the computer may not do any good.

Have you tried contacting his bank or the forgot password option on the bank's website?

Never had the need to go pass Hiren's Boot CD.
As mentioned before, you better use it on a flash USB.

Suggest not wasting time WITH THE COMPUTER PASSWORD, not the program ones, and brute force a password reset.
That should be the ticket.

Once you get inside, the emergency gone, also would do a disk clone and work with the clone and leave the original alone. Data recovery is all about reading original sources without making any changes to it. The source is not written to, just glimpsed at.

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There are a million ways to deal with this, but it depends on what you need access to. His actual PC OS, an application on said PC, some data that is on the disk. something else?
You should be able to boot Win7 with the above tips. If all you need is the data just stuff the disk in another machine and access it. But if its a combination like you need to run quicken and its password protected you are into brute force.

Guess I need to clarify a few things:
1. The computer is in TN and my sister-in-law needs to access my brother’s profile on it to get into all of the bill paying stuff he had.
2. I do not live in TN, so I’m trying to get his profile unlocked for her before I have return to AL in 2 days.
3. I do not have the time or ability where I am to take the computer anywhere, or put the HDD in another machine, or back anything up.

If this were at home it would be an entirely different story, but I’m under a time crunch here and with very little to work with!

Not sure how to pull this off but I believe I'd try a boot disk that can connect to the internet and then dl a remote access program like Teamviewer and with someone's remote assistance do the password reset thingy.

Basically, with a second computer and a flash drive you should be able to handle it yourself.

On the other computer download Hiren's boot disk, create a bootable CD with it (using Rufus or similar).
Make sure the originL computer boots from the USB drive either selecting boot order at boot pressing the proper Function key or going to the BIOS setup and modifying the boot order.
Once in Hiren's boot disk it should be quite easy and self explanatory.

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Stupid question #1 You sure there are no other users with admin rights that can access W7?

Stupid question #2 Have you already tried User user and User Admin with no pass unsuccessfuly?

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