Posted: 9/9/2005 5:09:41 PM EDT
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I have a laptop from work (Gateway solo 3350) ETA: duh,... WinXPpro employee was terminated, all the user/admin passwords have this thing locked up. I can open it up and look at the drive on another machine, but I'm having a problem figuring out what to do from there. this unit doesn't have it's CD drive and the only floppy we can use is a USB fdd. what to do when I can only remove the hdd? |
either it will be automatic, semi-auto or you will have to Dos it first... Check in the bios to see if it has an option to allow boot from USB device. Try it with a USB cd drive. How old it the laptop? what kind is it? EDIT TO ADD: Optical media drives (external) To determine the optical disc drive type, examine the drive tray's plastic cover. A DVD logo indicates a DVD drive, and a CD Digital Audio logo indicates a CD drive. CD drive: Constant angular velocity 10-24X. EIDE interface. Full stroke access time 150 ms (at 20X). 128K data buffer. CD Enhanced compatible. DVD drive: Constant angular velocity 1-8X DVD mode, 8-24X CD mode. 128K data buffer. Does it have a special input for a CD drive? |
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I have a floppy that alows you to reset all passwords. You will lose content on some folders for present user names. If you have a pcmcia slot you can boot from a card. You could get a small one on ebay,that wouldn be much. There are adapters that allow you to use a compact flash or other flash media in a pcmcia adapter.You can gety one of those at Best Buy or Circuit City for under 15 bucks. I am not 100% shure you can boot from that as I have never done it. I dont see why not though as your going through the pcmcia slot. Let me know and Ill dig up the floppy. |
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I need something that I can do with the physical drive removed from the computer. there isn't a way yet that I can find to boot from anything other than drives that I can't connect or via network. I have the means to do it if I had a bootable cd drive attached to it... but I dont. (reloading all the OS/programs is the major issue here w/o a cd drive.) I will find a way....... I may have to dig up an older pcmcia card and see what I can do with it. |
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My guess/opinion: The drive in the laptop is a standard ATA drive, as found in most desktops, and it is a 2.5 inch drive. From a data transfer standpoint, the drive is electricly compatable with a standard ata drive, but not power combatable. There is a ide 2.5" converter you can buy/use to connect power and data to the laptop drive, if you can get it out of the case. something like this --> http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=316123&pfp=BROWSE plug the laptop drive in that baby and access it like any other removable drive. edit: if works you can send me some money. edit edit: use l0phtcrack to get the passwords |
| I have a 2.5" to IDE adapter that I use at work. You pull the laptop's hard drive and install it in another machine and go at it. The adapter was like $9 from dirtcheapdrives.com. I've got a one spindle machine (hard drive only) which is a pain in the butt to recover/upgrade and the adapter made things easy. |
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I have a few questions to ask ya. 1. The passwords that you want to change/reset, are they for the bios so the machine will boot up, or is it just the passwords in Windows? If it is the bios that is password protected, then you can contact Gateway directly and they should have a way for you to reset the bios via a jumper, or switch somewhere. Just be sure to ask them for documentation showing and explaining this procedure in detail so you can get it apart and back together without breaking anything. All of their Desktops have this option anyway. If it is just the passwords in Windows, just do one of the ideas that the others have already provided you with, including the hard drive adapter, cause the cables in a desktop will not fit the drive without it. Keep us up to date as to answers and results. Someone here may already be able to help more with more info. 
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I have an IDE/USB interface. I do not have any of the external drives that came with this laptop(why are these the ones "lost" by their users??) I have the drive out of the laptop and am able to read it's contents. seeing how there is no way I can get an operating system on this thing w/o an external fdd/hdd, I'd like to disable or reset the passwords for the existing OS (XPpro) IF I had a bootable CD, this thread wouldn't be here.. I've used "Boot Disk" to recover several machines, and I'm sure I could have here too) |
not a bad Idea...may try this after my next attempt (swapping out the unknown SAM file with a known one) |
I chose to do this route first, and should have yesterday, but I was too lasy  .... it ended up working in a mater of minutes.lesson learned. 'boot disk' saves more time.... thanks for the help gang 
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I have a couple of questions / answers 1.) Do you need the info (files) off this machine? NO? Then use a bootable WinXP CD and do a reinstall 2.) Is the bios boot PW set? YES? There is a bios reset jumper that must be flipped and then power it on, this resets the bios PW If you just want to be able to use the machine for another employee, and dont care about the info in it than Follow #1 I hope this helps |