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merlin
12-13-2003, 10:47 PM
ive had visitors and my darling nephew has been messing with my laptop and put a password on it so now when i switch it on it asks me for the password and neither him or his sister know what they have done,is this an expensive shop job with loss of data or can it be done by myself somehow to disable this password, i really need this sorting as i have appointments and stuff on it that i havent got in my diary, please advise me a,s,a,p

locustfurnace
12-13-2003, 10:55 PM
What OS are you running on it? If the 9x series, just hit cancel, and log in anyway. do a search for the *.pwl file and delete it, it will remove the password.
for other OS - such as NT, you might need to a boot disk, with support for reading a NTFS system - if the system was set up with NTFS. Sometimes those systems still go with FAT32, which will still allow it to be read with a fat32 bootdisk.
need to know what OS you have running on the system, what sort of system it is.

merlin
12-14-2003, 07:10 AM
yeah sorry , it is a dell laptop running windows 98, ive had it about 4 years 2 months, ive tried the cancel idea but it doesnt work ? could i boot it from a start up disc i created with my other computer when i first installed windows 98 on it and then perhaps disable the password somehow?

locustfurnace
12-14-2003, 09:17 AM
You could that. Boot up to the DOS prompt, then when presented with the A: prompt, A: you will want to change the drive your working on to drive C:, just type at the "A:" this, without quotes "C:".
This will place you on the C:, your prompt now should look like this C:, now you can type cd windows, this will place you in the Windows directory, where the password file is kept. Then all you should now have to do is type, without quotes "del *.pwl", the * is a wildcard, meaning it will search for all occurances of files that have the same extension, which is pwl, thats the password file.

If your not comfortable deleting the file with a wildcard, and want to specify a full name, and without knowing the name you can locate all files, filenames by doing this, on the C:\Windows prompt, which you have changed to, type this to show you all password files and their names, without quotes "dir *.pwl", and it should show you any and all password list files, then you can delete them on a name by name basis. So for example, if the file ends up being merlin.pwl, you would type at the c:\windows prompt, without quotes "del merlin.pwl".

Then after you deleted all of these, you remove floppy bootdisk, reboot, this time when your presented with the login dialog, just type a name merlin, and OK, and OK the second time, then you should not have to use a password again. - if this route works.