Almost had a major problem here at work yesterday. A co-worker from another location was here with his laptop and some very important files on his hard drive. To make a long story short, we could not get past the initial logon screen to windows xp pro. Decided to just boot from the "a" drive and retrieve the files. But....his hard drive was partitioned off with the extended partition being ntfs. And, of course, that was where he stored the files we needed. Finally called a local guru who bailed us out by hacking in and removing the password at the logon screen.

My question is this. Is there some program out there that will boot the computer and allow you to "see" all the files and drives on the hard drive regardless of file system....fat "and" ntfs? Sure would like to have it available in case this ever happens again.

yep. Search for NTFSdos. See NTFS files with a dos boot disk.

At this site you can get a bootdisk for just about anything.

http://bootdisk.com/
http://bootdisk.com/readntfs.htm

Thanks guys. TC comes through again. graemlins/thumbsup.gif

You can use that and there are also some cd's out there now that use a windows ce shell and it lets you get to a desktop even though it is from the cd. The catch is you have to be able to log on with an account. It then lets you reset the passwords etc real cool.