Recover your Data when Windows Password is lost?

Do you use a Windows PC and have lost your password? Do not worry! I will share two methods on how to recover your files and data from the locked PC. There may be a situation when you switch on your Windows PC but you are not able to log in. You get “The password is incorrect. Try Again.” message. This may happen in a situation when you have tried to log in after a long duration. Or, you may have recently changed your password and have not memorized it. Or, you may have not noted your updated password (The irony is, you should not note your password anywhere for preventing misuse of password).

Anyways, the fact is that your password is lost forever and you cannot login to your system. To erase the password and re-enter a new password on your system, you will need to re-install fresh Windows Operating system on your computer. But, if you will format and re-install Windows on your PC, all your data will be lost. Such data may contain important files which you need to recover from the computer’s hard disk. Thus, in any case you need to recover these files and copy them to a safe location such as a removable media i.e. a flash drive or a DVD / CD. Then, proceed ahead with formatting the computer and re-installing fresh Windows Operating System. Once, the fresh Windows operating system is installed, copy your important data back to your hard disk accessible on Windows Operating System computer.

In such situation, what you can do is a bit tricky. I will share two tricks to recover your data before formatting the hard drive and re-installing Windows.

Trick 1: Remove and Attach Hard Disk to another Computer

1. Switch off your computer and take off the external power cable
2. Open computer cabinet
3. Locate your hard disk
4. Remove internal Power cable and Data cable from Hard Disk slots
5. Remove Hard Disk from the cabinet
6. Now, arrange another computer which already has windows installed on it
7. Switch off this computer in the same manner and attach your hard disk as a secondary hard drive to this computer by using its data and power cable inside the cabinet
8. Boot from the primary hard drive of this computer
9. Log into the system and open “My Computer”.
10. The secondary hard disk will be visible as new partitions on this computer
11. Insert a flash drive in this system
12. Copy and paste your data to the flash drive from the secondary hard disk. You may even burn your data to a DVD or CD if DVD/ CD burner is available on this system
13. After copying data, switch off the computer and remove the secondary hard disk and re-attach it to the earlier computer.
14. Re-install Windows and copy your data from the flash drive back to your hard disk.

Trick 2: Use a Linux bootable Flash Drive on Windows Computer

You can use a Linux bootable Flash Drive to boot from it and copy your data on a temporary storage. Create a Linux Mint Bootable Flash Drive. Insert it into the Windows system whose password is lost and restart the computer.

While the system is restarting, press F10 (or Del or F9 or F12 or Esc) to enter BIOS Setup of that computer. If you are not able to enter the BIOS setup, try other keys as well as per Make and Model of your machine to enter BIOS setup.

Select USB Storage Boot as Booting Device from boot options. Save and Exit setup. The computer will restart again. While system is restarting, press F9 (or Del or F10 or F12 or Esc) to display Boot Menu. If Boot Menu is not displayed, try other keys as per Make and Model of your machine to display Boot Menu.

Select Flash Drive as Boot Device from the List of available options and Hit Enter. Linux Mint Live Session will load from Flash Drive.  Open File Explorer in live session. Check out the Windows partitions under Devices category. Primary partition (most probably C: Drive) and secondary partitions (may be D: drive or E: drive) will be visible in Linux Mint File Explorer.

Now, minimize file explorer and insert a flash drive in the system. The flash drive will be detected and mounted. Open Windows secondary partition. Copy all your important data folders and files. Go back to flash drive and paste your copied data on it. Now open primary partition of Windows and look out for locations such as Desktop, Documents, Download, etc. under main user’s folder under “Documents and Settings” folder. Open Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc. folders and copy data from there. Paste the copied data on the Flash Drive. Eject the flash drive safely once all your personal data is copied from Windows partitions to removable Flash Drive.

You may now reinstall Windows system and copy back your data on the Hard Disk through new Windows Operating System.

Be careful in future about losing your password!!!

Watch the practical demonstration of the above process in following video: