How to wipe deceased person’s locked laptop.

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My bosses son died and he would like to use his laptop but its locked and there is no lost password disk to go with it.He does not need any information on it so wiping it is not a problem Its a Sony, Model SVE151A11W running Win 7. I contacted a service number on the back as it had been in the shop for repair in the past and they said if its a machine password they can get into it but if its a microsoft password they cannot and my boss (John) will have to pay a minimum $90.00 charge for nothing. First question is “is this a microsoft password” if I put in a thu.mb drive and click on “Reset Password ” ,it brings up a Welcome to the Password reset Wizard, does that mean its a microsoft password. Second Question is “Whats the chances of recovering this laptop. Thanks.
Pete
Just noticed that in the Password Reset Wizard it says “The password key disk is in the following drive.”then in a box it says FLASH DRIVE (E) does that mean that a Reset Disk was made at some point. Cheers Pete.

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imo its likely to be a M$ created reset feature.
M$ official page and steps to create a reset
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-password-reset-disk#1TC=windows-7
and further info and guide,
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/use-a-usb-flash-drive-to-create-windows-password-reset-disk-in-windows-7/

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Use the Offline Password Recovery CD to remove the password. Then you can do whatever you want with the machine.
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//175307-How-to-make-Bootable-USB-Drive-OR-How-to-recover-Admin-Password?p=1050870&viewfull=1#post1050870

cheers, Paul

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Alternatively, to wipe it completely and utterly try the free DBAN. You need to burn it to a CD (or USB Flash Drive) and boot from this. It can take hours to run, depending on the capacity of the drive and the options you choose.
I’ve not used the newest version (2.30), but here’s a reviewof it.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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If you really cannot recover the password (or don’t think it’s worthwhile), then wipe the drive and start over. Might be time to consider adopting a newer OS too, though that is a whole other subject.

Thumbs up on DBAN. It’s only needed for secure wiping, but in a personal setting DBAN is the de facto tool of choice here.

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If you really cannot recover the password (or don’t think it’s worthwhile), then wipe the drive and start over. Might be time to consider adopting a newer OS too, though that is a whole other subject.

Thumbs up on DBAN. It’s only needed for secure wiping, but in a personal setting DBAN is the de facto tool of choice here.

I was up untill midnight trying to work out Offline Password Recovery (thanks Paul)but had no luck. So if I use DBAN that will wipe the laptop clean and then I am able to start clean. Is that right. My Boss John wants me to load a backup of his WIN 7 and then upgrade to WIN 10. I will look at DBAN tonight. Thanks Pete.

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Pete,

You have a Backup? Why not just restore the backup no real need to take the time to run DBAN. Of course, I’m assuming that the Backup is an Image backup and you have the boot media to use to restore it. But, if that is the case DBAN is a waste of time IMHO.

HTH :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Pete,

You have a Backup? Why not just restore the backup no real need to take the time to run DBAN. Of course, I’m assuming that the Backup is an Image backup and you have the boot media to use to restore it. But, if that is the case DBAN is a waste of time IMHO.

HTH :cheers:

Thanks RG, but the backup I have is for Johns Laptop, which runs Win 7 but it is not a Sony.

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if I use DBAN that will wipe the laptop clean…

Well considering that DBAN stands for “Derik’s Boot and Nuke”, yeah, clean doesn’t begin to describe what DBAN does. The interface will offer you several choices for wiping information. Know that any one of them will normally be sufficient, as in, you really can’t make a wrong choice. Except by maybe exiting the program without running the wipe!

The more advanced wipe techniques are only for the seriously paranoid and they add a lot of time to the erasure cycle.

When I said that DBAN is only needed for secure wiping, I was completely serious. If you run an OS install and delete and re-create the partitions, you get much the same result, just without the heavy-duty security aspects. It’s good enough for most purposes.

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The OP’s post is entitled How to wipe deceased person’s locked laptop. but almost immediately goes on to change this to “he would like to use his laptop but its locked”… so it’s easy to see how confusing these 2 statements are.

Basically, the OP’s boss will not be able to use the laptop in question if it’s either locked (no access to the OS) or wiped (no OS).

If the OP’s boss wants to re-use the laptop then there doesn’t seem to be much point wasting hours of time wiping the OS using DBAN.

If Offline Password Recovery can’t be used to reset the laptop’s OS account passwords (post #3) then either restore the laptop using a system image backup or the OEM Restore Media/Partition.

If none of these are available then Sony should be able to provide Restore media for less cost than the local repair shop.

Hope this helps…

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The OP’s post is entitled How to wipe deceased person’s locked laptop. but almost immediately goes on to change this to “he would like to use his laptop but its locked”… so it’s easy to see how confusing these 2 statements are.

Basically, the OP’s boss will not be able to use the laptop in question if it’s either locked (no access to the OS) or wiped (no OS).

If the OP’s boss wants to re-use the laptop then there doesn’t seem to be much point wasting hours of time wiping the OS using DBAN.

If Offline Password Recovery can’t be used to reset the laptop’s OS account passwords (post #3) then either restore the laptop using a system image backup or the OEM Restore Media/Partition.

If none of these are available then Sony should be able to provide Restore media for less cost than the local repair shop.

Hope this helps…

Sorry about the confusion, what I mean is John wants to reuse the laptop but does not need any information from it so I thought it needs to be wiped before any thing can be done with it. I made a backup for Johns laptop a while back and said I could run a restore to his dead sons laptop. BEFORE I knew there was no password for it.
Thanks for the advice about getting restore media from Sony. I will continue to try to work out how to use Offline Password Recovery.

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Sorry about the confusion, what I mean is John wants to reuse the laptop but does not need any information from it so I thought it needs to be wiped before any thing can be done with it. I made a backup for Johns laptop a while back and said I could run a restore to his dead sons laptop. BEFORE I knew there was no password for it.
Thanks for the advice about getting restore media from Sony. I will continue to try to work out how to use Offline Password Recovery.

No need to apologise…

The How-To Geek has a good article about using the Offline Password Recovery utility.

Hope this helps…

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Thanks for the advice about getting restore media from Sony. I will continue to try to work out how to use Offline Password Recovery.

Hopefully the Offline Password Recovery will work for you. It’s been about 8 years since I had a Sony Vaio but, just in case you have to revert it to Factory Settings (using Restore media or partition), be aware that Sony were reknowned for the amount of pre-installed bloatware they included in the factory builds. You may need to check out PC Decrapifier to fix this.

Hope this helps…

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…. in case you have to revert it to Factory Settings (using Restore media or partition), be aware that Sony were reknowned for the amount of pre-installed bloatware they included ….

God, you are right about that!

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Hopefully the Offline Password Recovery will work for you. It’s been about 8 years since I had a Sony Vaio but, just in case you have to revert it to Factory Settings (using Restore media or partition), be aware that Sony were reknowned for the amount of pre-installed bloatware they included in the factory builds. You may need to check out PC Decrapifier to fix this.

Hope this helps…

I managed to do the wipe and return to “as new” and yes I will look at PC Decrapifer. There sure is a lot of apps that are not needed. I did the wipe by hitting a certain button or two which gave me the option to do what I wanted. Funny though because I was also able to retrieve the personal information and data from it with no password. After showing this to John we both agreed it should be wiped with DBAN ( Apart from a few personal family photos and videos ). This has made me aware that my PC probably is not as secure as I thought and am going to find out more about this type of thing to protect myself from this type of thing.. With no experience with this type of thing I was able to you might say “hack” a PC in very little time..
Cheers Pete. Thanks for the help.

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If you have a Windows 7 license key, you could just use the Media Creation Tool to clean install Windows 10.

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Sorry about the confusion, what I mean is John wants to reuse the laptop but does not need any information from it so I thought it needs to be wiped before any thing can be done with it. I made a backup for Johns laptop a while back and said I could run a restore to his dead sons laptop. BEFORE I knew there was no password for it.
Thanks for the advice about getting restore media from Sony. I will continue to try to work out how to use Offline Password Recovery.

No need to apologise…

The How-To Geek has a good article about using the Offline Password Recovery utility. I’ve used it many times so know how effective the utility is.

Hope this helps…

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https://community.newegg.com/archive_2007-2013/product_support/f/8/t/99608.aspx

If Offline Password Recovery does not work then it is not a Windows password. It should not take more than 5 minutes to try. Several boot disks have it already on it including Hirens.

If it is not a Windows password then wiping (indeed this is unnecessary as just killing off the partition and recreating it and a quick format is sufficient) the drive will not release the laptop.

If it is a encrypted hard drive then deleting the partition, etc. will work. That may indeed be what the password flash drive indicates.

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The Sony Restore Media would be a good thing to have, regardless of whether you need it this time around or not. My suggestion is to order the Restore Media.

If you can wait till it arrives, your job of wiping the drive and starting fresh will be much easier than with any other method, because what it does is (1) wipe the drive, and (2) restore everything to brand-new factory condition. And it doesn’t require very much effort on your part.

Once you have the laptop all set and ready to go, it would be a good idea to do a backup of it, so that getting it ready to go in the future would be quick and easy.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Just head off to your local rock band and ask them if you can leave the laptop’s HDD taped to their speaker magnets for an hour or so… Then do a low-level format of the disc, because it will be unusable otherwise.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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And you get to listen to the gig while the magnets do their work!

cheers, Paul

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