Hey all, I was wondering if someone could give me some advice.
I recently came into posession of an old laptop, I think it's like a PIII 700 or something, which was about to go on a cheapo bulk lot order at my work (we deal PCs and parts) and I ended up adopting it.
It has Windows NT installed on it, and I have a regular user password for it but not the Administrator password.
I want to reformat the drive and start over with WIndows XP, but everything I try it tells me I don't have access, even booting from the Windows XP CD and trying to reformat/repartition the drive. (I even get "Access denied" errors at the DOS prompt)
I'd rather not buy a new HD for it if I can help it, and I don't need anything that's on it but I want to start fresh.
Is there any way I can wipe/reformat/repartition the drive to start fresh without the Administrator password?
I want to use it as an extra machine to stuff with, but I can't install all my audio programs or anything with the stupid NT installation that I don't have any user rights on.
I basically got it for practically nothing as it was almost going to be "scrapped".. (Sold for like 25 bucks with a bunch of others to make room for newer stuff, it's got some cosmetic damage but seems to work ok)
Any advice would be appreciated.
Edited, Sat May 27 23:46:20 2006 by Joujouka
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Get a laptop IDE drive adaptor Now pull the laptop drive and plug it into a working full computer as a secondary drive and boot up. Then format the secondary drive.
It's either that, or crack the admin password, which is not hard to do on NT 4. http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html
using something like that, or others.
If your laptop also has a bios password, you'll need to either figure out what it was from the people you bought it from, buy a new bios chip and attach it to the board, or just ignore it and hope that you never have to change settings.
It's either that, or crack the admin password, which is not hard to do on NT 4. http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html
using something like that, or others.
If your laptop also has a bios password, you'll need to either figure out what it was from the people you bought it from, buy a new bios chip and attach it to the board, or just ignore it and hope that you never have to change settings.
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
Get a laptop IDE drive adaptor Now pull the laptop drive and plug it into a working full computer as a secondary drive and boot up. Then format the secondary drive.
It's either that, or crack the admin password, which is not hard to do on NT 4. http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html
using something like that, or others.
If your laptop also has a bios password, you'll need to either figure out what it was from the people you bought it from, buy a new bios chip and attach it to the board, or just ignore it and hope that you never have to change settings.
It's either that, or crack the admin password, which is not hard to do on NT 4. http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html
using something like that, or others.
If your laptop also has a bios password, you'll need to either figure out what it was from the people you bought it from, buy a new bios chip and attach it to the board, or just ignore it and hope that you never have to change settings.
Cool, I will try that.. nope, the BIOS is not protected so I am able to get into that, so I can boot from a CD.
Thanks.
You could also pull the drive, find a very large speaker magnet, and run it across the drive about 50 or so passes. That might do the trick.
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You could also burn a win98x boot disk to a cd and repartition the drive that way. It won't recognize the drives properly but fdisk has no problem wiping non-dos drives without any hiccups. Once all partitions are removed you shouldn't have any problems making a fat32 partition and then installing a newer version of windows that can convert the partition to ntfs.
I'm drunk.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I'm drunk.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Oh yeah, that reminds me, a knoppix disk would also work too
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Jacobsdeception the Sly wrote:
I'm drunk.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Twiz?
Or you could put the drive into another PC with a cable converter and do whatever the hell you please with it. The whole process takes about 5 mins. You import the drive as a foriegn disk and then you can wipe it easily.
I agree with Kao, Knoppix is the way to go. Quick, easy and painless.
Mistress Darqflame wrote:
I agree with Kao, Knoppix is the way to go. Quick, easy and painless.
darqflame, great avatar btw.
yes if winXP is not letting you format reinstall, then it could be a BIOS lock. google for a tool called killcmos works great for things like that.
Knoppix is GOD for repairing MS problems too.
so a win98 CD or a win98 boot floppy with fdisk and format should do the trick too.
Can't you just go to DOS with a bootdisk and then just FDISK the sucker? That is one sure way to be able to format.
wwdragon
wwdragon
The One and Only wwdragon wrote:
Can't you just go to DOS with a bootdisk and then just FDISK the sucker? That is one sure way to be able to format.
This was my thought as well, and the reason why I usually keep a few Win98 bootdisks with utilities on hand.
publiusvarus wrote:
we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.
If all else fails, try a hammer.
FDISK is okay for smaller HDDs (37GB), but with the advent of multi-hundred gig drives, it can be flaky. I concur with the non-Microsoft drive wipe. I personally use the free tools that can be downloaded from the HDD manufacturer websites, Norton's GDisk, or DBan's Boot n Nuke for low-level formats.
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