Servicing a DELL C400… PART 1
A co-worker of mine has asked me to take a look at his laptop. He claims, it runs slow, doesn’t boot properly and he can’t do anything with it.
Being the nice guy I am, I took it home today. The machine being serviced in a Dell c400, P3 laptop. Not a bad machine at all.
Upon powering up the system, the first error message occurs during boot.
It’s a floppy drive read error. The resolution to this is to not have the floppy enabled, or make it the last boot device within the boot order of the BIOS settings. This particular laptop is so small, the Floppy and dvd drive are external. So if the floppy is NOT connected during boot , it gives an error. So I rebooted the machine and pressed F2 to enter the BIOS setup. I set the proper date, time and moved the floppy to the last boot device. I saved my settings and rebooted.
Wonderful news, no more errors and the machine booted to the Windows XP Login screen after a 2 second post.
At this time I ran into another problem. There’s a password set on the User and Administrator account. What can I do? I told him I would give the laptop back in good order the next day. I can’t call him or guess his password because it’s after midnight and I don’t know what he would use.
So my only option is to HACK IT!
How do you hack and recover a password? Check out the next post!