Access Data of a Password Protected User in Windows XP in Case the PC Fails to

Boot

You may come across a situation in which your windows XP PC fails to reboot, and
the most accepted solution to that problem is to re-format the Hard Disk. Before
formatting, you should backup your files. If your computer is password protected,
you won�t be able to access them from outside, so here is a method for getting
around this.

Steps :

1.Boot the machine from Windows XP bootable CD.

2.At the setup screen, select R to repair using Recovery Console.
3.Now the console program will prompt you to select the Windows folder (eg.
C:\WINDOWS) where the Windows is installed (you need to enter a number from the
list of folders shown to you).
4.Type �HELP� (without single quotes) and press enter for available commands. This
is like a DOS program, but some features are not available
5.Change the current directory to the user�s directory where you want to backup.
6.Type �CD �C:\Documents and Settings\X�� (without single quotes) and press enter.
Where X is the username.
7.Now the current directory will change to �C:\Documents and Settings\X�.
8.Now change the directory to Desktop by entering �CD Desktop� (without single
quotes) and press enter to go to the desktop folder.
9.Type �DIR� (Without single quotes) and press enter, you will be listed all the
available files in Desktop.
10.Type �COPY a.doc D:\BACKUP� (without quotes) and press enter, where a.doc is a
file available in Desktop and the folder D:\BACKUP available to copy the files.
11.As in step 7,8,9,10 you can backup other folders like �My Documents�, �My
Music�, etc.
12.Note that you cannot use wildcards for COPY, i.e. you cannot copy all the files
in a folder at once. You must copy one file by one.

Tips :

Before doing this, try changing the password to blank so that you can access the
data from another machine to easily drag and drop to copy your data.

Warnings :

Any data not backed up will be permanently deleted when you re-format the hard
drive, so make sure you back up any thing you want to keep.

Things You�ll Need :

A Bootable Windows XP CD