Hey everyone, recently I got a couple of computers from a friend of my parents, her daughter had passed away and she knew I collect parts and work on computers, my question is this, both are password protected and I know I could just wipe the hard drives and start over with them, but her mother wanted to get all of the personal stuff like pictures and videos of the family off the computers, how would I be able to bypass the sign in screen so I can do this?

The best way to do this, I am not sure if it will work any more, is to get a copy of the ubuntu bootable CD. Boot onto that. Plug in an external drive and copy all the stuff over. The permissions might stop you though. Another way is to get a Hard drive enclosure and hook those up as an external USB/eSATA drive. That could work as well.

I personally use Hirens Boot CD, a few utilities in there help me bypass/reset Windows profile passwords.
As mentioned above slaving the hard drives in another desktop or putting them in a USB enclosure might be your best bet.

The issue with booting from a live CD is that; even though Ubuntu/Linux Distro's share the resources of the PC (thus the windows OS), any file permissions (especially encrypted files) established by a previous OS can still carry over. You'll get some wonky error when browsing certain portions of the HDD or attempting to open certain data files/folders if this happens.

It's quite the same with turning this HDD into a USB/External Drive. The files on the HDD are still there, in their original format, and with the original file permissions. Taking it out of the machine, attaching it as a peripheral device to another machine, and browsing the HDD via another OS doesn't automatically make the files accessible and free to view all the time.

Your best bet boils down to two things.

1. You can try the above two methods as it ultimately comes down to how the previous file permissions/Operating System was setup on that HDD/machine.
2. Use software to bypass the credential prompt. NeedKarma gave you a great start with Hirens.


*Sidenote: Hirens isn't simply cracking the password for you. It essentially gives you access to the HDD with 'fake' credentials. What this means is that if ANY files are encrypted on those HDD's, Hirens won't work (too my knowledge).

Collectively, I feel we've given you a great start to you project. Good luck!

Actually Hirens resets the Windows password to <blank> so that you can reboot and access the profile(s) normally.