A family member passed away. We need to access his Windows laptop for the usual reasons, especially since he kept very few paper records. It is password protected and we have no idea what the password might be. I am pretty sure he did not encrypt the hard drive. So, first, I guess we could put the drive in another device and access it that way? If that's true, then that would be better than nothing. But also, is there any way to recover use of the entire laptop? Is there a "computer locksmith" who would have the ability and legal right (when presented with the appropriate court documents, of course) to open up the laptop?
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Is it protected using BitLocker? (Depending on that, it'll usually be either completely trivial or damn near impossible, with only few cases in-between that would require any advanced "locksmithing".) – u1686_grawity Apr 20 '20 at 14:43
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@user1686 I'm pretty sure not. He was not IT-sophisticated enough to deal with such things. – bob.sacamento Apr 20 '20 at 14:44
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You should be able to download Hirens bootable cd and load it onto a flash drive. boot the laptop to the flash drive and then use the security tools on Hirens to delete or create a new password for his account. once this is done unplug the flash drive and boot the laptop like normal and login with the new password you created. this will give you full access to his account. this can only be done if his account is a local account on the laptop and its not a domained user account going through Active directory.
BigBob1003
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