I had to back up a hard disk in preparation for reformatting a hard disk, and upgrading an XP Home install to XP Pro. Multiple users in XP Home had saved files to the hard disk, and had password protected their logins. They also made their files private. Logging in as a different personal user id with administrator privs would not give me access to the files so that I could copy them. I kept seeing an "Access is Denied" error from XP. The users were not on site, so I couldn't get access to their passwords. What to do?

I went into the "Users Icon" in Control Panel. I selected the user that owned that drive. I then selected the "remove password" option for that user (double click on that user, and look for this option). Since I had admin privs, XP Home allowed me to accomplish this removal. I then logged out, and then logged in as this user without the need for any password. This gave me access to the files which I then copied off onto another drive.

Obviously don't do this unless you're getting rid of the operating system, or doing a fdisk-kind of rebuild. Flushing passwords associated with accounts on a machine that is still valid can cause a bit of aggravation for that user.

XP Home is such a piece of junk, it should be replaced with XP Pro as a matter of course.

Chris

I just did this on a laptop with 4 password locked users. I did an XP Home repair, and cleaned the hard drives registry. All when well. The users just reinstalled each password