Unfortunately my Dad passed away a little over a week ago, and I have his PC. I am trying to log onto his computer, but I cannot because I don't have a password. He changed the password on the administrator account from the default so I can't log with that (it's the account he used anyways, so there is no others, and guest is disabled). I know there are several methods involving booting off of a CD, but I can't get it to boot off of them.
I just got done rebuilding it to clean out dust and remove the smoke smell, and I put it back together the way it was at first. I have tried connecting the SATA CD drive to port 1 on the MOBO, and configuring the boot order in the bios, but that doesn't work. I then tried an IDE drive he had in there, configured for Master and connected to the IDE port, but that didn't boot either.
The boot disks I am trying are Windows 7, Ones made with Active, and a Ubuntu disk, with both the OS ones booting on my PC. If I disable all other boot devices except the CD drive (so it can't default to anything else), it wants me it insert a bootable medium and press a key. When I do that, or on initial boot, the drive is active and it pauses before displaying the message as if it is trying to boot off of the disk, but is still unsuccessful. I can't reset the password if I can't boot off of anything but the hard-drive. I do have some hard-drives laying around with operating systems on them, so I could try booting off of them, but then I wouldn't know what steps to take to reset the password on the original hard-drive.
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
