My wife’s Uncle died on Saturday, he lived alone, no wife, no kids. Anyways he has a laptop he used for a lot of stuff and the family are looking to gain access to it. It is password protected as far as I am aware.
Is there anyway to gain access to it.
Cheers
What kind of laptop? Apple? PC? What OS? I’ll assume PC.
If it’s your typical Windows password, you should be able to pull the drive, plug it into another computer using an enclosure or something, and use admin privliedges to access it.
If it’s Bitlocker-encrypted, you’re sorta fucked unless someone has the recovery key.
I went through something similar when my brother died. Learned the hard way what tech companies will or won’t do in that situation. Google, for instance, won’t give you shit, even if you provide proof of death and proof or direct relationship. You need a court order.
I will say, ethically, it’s a weird area. If feels like trespassing.
It’s your duty to get to it first and delete his browsing history and porn folder.
Who will recover my Qt3 account after I die?
It’s a standard Toshiba laptop with Windows 8. The annoying thing is I set it up for him a few years ago and part remember his PW its the last few digits which are numerical I cannot remember. It is to do with his favourite soccer team and when they won something so may have to troll through all the dates and see.
Open it up, pull the hard drive, and pick up a cheap external enclosure from Amazon or something. Then just plug it into another PC’s USB port and you should be able to get at all the contents.
My question is: what do you think is on there that you need to retrieve? Seems like something that might be best left locked, unless there’s something super important on there.
Went through this with my Mom recently. The number one reason is pictures. People put pictures somewhere and for her, it was on that laptop.
The number 2 reason is account information for tons of sites, including some ebills she paid.
Fortunately the last few years of her life her memory had declined and she wrote down some of her passwords. About a year ago I had to help her recover an account, and at that time I rounded up accounts and passwords for everything she could tell me and emailed it to both of my sisters so we all had the information.
Good luck, @Reemul. I hope your wife is taking things well. This might help:
Just as an added thing, plan on it yourself. I know I have a metric ton of shit I use that is internet based. I’ve put the current running passwords for important stuff in gmail and set this up with copies to three relatives upon my death (or letting my account go dormant.)
There are also dead man’s switch types of services that will do the same. It’s morbid to think about, but I can’t count on someone finding the exact hard copy of something I have (perhaps a life insurance policy), but then have zero access to the online equivalent.
Thanks for this. I will give it a go.
One issue is in the UK this weekend Thurs - Saturday we had really bad snow (for the UK) and Colin who was a bit of a recluse would not answer his phone, this is not unusual however due to the weather family got worried and entry was forced on Saturday morning and he was found in his bed.
Time and cause of death is unknown atm and I think family members are hoping for some Laptop activity to show when he was alive. They feel guilty but in my book there was nothing anyone could do, he went weeks without speaking to anyone or answering his phone. His mum, my wife’s grandma died a month a go and he wasn’t taking it too well.
It’s all a bit of a mess and people are hoping for a few answers, whether this provides that or not is unknow but as the resident IT guy they have asked me to take a look.
Good luck and I hope they find some peace, via information gleaned or otherwise. My GF’s father was a recluse and died nearly similarly, which was shocking to their family, though in his case it was very advanced lung cancer he had told noone about.
Some related HN discussion for today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16531492
Woe to the person whose passed-on loved one is smart + paranoid enough to use FileVault or BitLocker.
@Skipper’s solution is similar to one I used very recently to hack a Windows 10 laptop. At my firm, we do a lot of estate planning and probate work. We had a client who passed away, and his adult children brought us a laptop he used that they knew had all his financial institution data on it (bank names, fund names, account numbers, etc.). Unfortunately for them, it was password protected via his local profile and nobody knew what his password had been.
I had to download Windows 10 setup from Microsoft to a USB drive, then change the boot options of the laptop to boot to USB. I then used Utility Manager to setup a new account with Administrator access, booted the laptop to that account, and changed the password on the client’s account with my administrator account. Rebooted again, used the new password with the client account, and BAM, access granted. It took about 15 minutes total.
Let me know if you can’t get in using the instructions already posted above and I will send you more detailed instructions on what I did, which will probably work with Windows 8.1 too.
Oh, and if his login isn’t a local account, but a Microsoft one (uses email address as login), you can reset that online through Microsoft.