Password trouble

Ok, recently my roommate was on his laptop and its been working fine for the most part. Well, he locked it using the Win+L key combo and when he tried to sign back in, it wouldnt let him. He tried entering his password several times and it did nothing. After restarting his laptop once, it POSTed but after that is said somethink like "OS not found" (he doesnt remember exactly). After another restart he attempted to login to his guest account which also locked him out as well. After a few more restarts we got into his guess account however he has it so limited that its almost useless. I ran chkdsk through bios, im not sure which one but it took about an hour to complete on a 120GB 7200rpm hd and it checked out fine(if that matters). Im thinking he may have gotten a trojan that enable remote access or it was a keylogger but we cant even sign in to run a virus program. Any help (if possible and other than formatting or using recovery cds) would be greatly appreciated.

 

Remember that NBR prohibits the discussion of bypassing security measures like logins for any reason.

With that in mind, use a bootable live CD like BartPE(with the necessary AV plugins) or UBCD to run a scan. Also some linux live cds like Knoppix(see here) also have the abilty to do a virus scan.

 

Forum policy does not allow discussion here of anything which may be illegal or of interest to those with illegal intentions.

However, if you Google for "recover lost Windows password" you will find a number of suggestions which may help.

However, if your friend has picked up something nasty which is deliberately locking him out then the first challenge is to find it and disable /remove it. That becomes a whole new problem. You may be able to run a scanner in safe mode or you may need to find a tool which boots off a CD. If this looks to be the problem then check out the tools at the major AV websites.

John

 

BartPE will allow me enough user rights to run an antivirus scan? Or does it come as and admin because its like its own OS. Im asking because like i siad he has it limited so the guest can do virtually nothing; i dont even understand why he has a guest. Also, i forgot to mention hes running a 64-bit OS with Vista; will that matter at all.