maricle on Casper st.

i get a call last nite at 6:15 pm (I was not home yet) that said the pastor's notebook had died and was no longer booting. I call him aback around 7pm and sure enough, it won't boot. so he's brining it over as the last backup was 4 months ago.
i go to boot it - and it's missing some core windows files. inturesting. he says he may have allowed a virus to run on it by clicking the wrong button in norton antivirus. no big deal.
throw in knoppix 3.3 and bloom - knoppix can't load - fatal error or something. strange. never seen that before - maybe it's some non-standard ide interface or something (oh yeah, and the cd was in a firewire cd drive)
SO - i install windows on top of it's self knwonig that the user accounts will be untouched.
right as it's finishing, John says "oh yeah, i had a password on my account"
i'm thinking - how bad can it be, it's windows xp home.
so it loads, we click on the old profile and 'error accessing folder' , ok, so it's encrypted. i just need a tool to feed it his old password and we're off and running, right?
WRONG - read this. i found a hairy walk through on recombining both keys (lost the link) - but home does not have all the tools. i stole one from xp-pro, but the other would not run.
i was conviced we were pretty much screwed and gave him a generous 35% recovery estimate possiblity - and sent him home at 10pm.
I started banging on google learning more windows security terms and came up with this which pointed to this. a close inspection of the win xp home demonstrated nothing fancy with keys. wow, it can't be this easy.
i almost didn't try it, but figured i'd nothing to loose.
it worked!@ - and 3.8gb was recovered. flawlessly.
i called him back at 11:10 so he could sleep easier and burned him a dvd around midnight while watching some sermons i found in his stuff. good sermons.