Accessing a password protected hard drive

[AlbertLionheart]

I have a perfectly serviceable drive taken from a dead laptop and wish to recover images and files from it. It was protected by the O/S password and the contents of Documents and Settings are not available. I have the password but no opportunity to use it. I have tried booting another machine from the drive but being Vista it refuses, including safe mode.
Anyone any ideas how I can get at the contents of this - any tools to download that will help perhaps?
Any help much appreciated!

 

[raybay]

What caused the "dead laptop" to become dead?
What is brand and model of the hard drive or of the dead laptop? and how do you know it is "perfectly serviceable?"
Have you tried using an external enclosure and entering the password from there?

 

[AlbertLionheart]

take it from me it is dead - will not boot even into the BIOS
doesn't matter what sort of drive it is - I can access the files and folders when connected to another machine but cannot open the user files.
If I try and open the user files I get 'access denied'
cheers

 

[Leeky]

Tried it with an external enclosure in a Linux live CD?

Works wonders some times. Been caught out in the past with my daughters laptop dying, worked for me.

 

[tuant]

Take ownership of the directory and give yourself full permission.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

The taking ownership seems to have worked although I did have to get at the folder from the command prompt and copy the files to another folder on the system before I could get at them.

 

[jmjsquared]

Next time, try this...

Hopefully, there won't be a next time but just in case, you may consider keeping this tool handy, Spotmau 2009 at: http://www.spotmau.com/products/package/full.htm?SSAID=358497.

Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals 2005 can also do the trick of recovering passwords but not for Vista (I think).... if you can find it. He now works for Microsoft and his tools are now called Windows Sysinternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

:wave:

 

[AlbertLionheart]

A really useful set of tools there - so much there I will need to spend a week finding out about them!
many thanks!