Toshiba satellite recovery disk

[pbschafer]

Hello,
My neice who is 11 set and forgot her password in Vista. It is not a BIOS password. I have reset both of those. Somehow her administrators account is also disabled and she has lost or never had the recovery disk. I need to reinstall the OS and don't know where to turn. Can anyone help me?
Bob

 

[mhelm1]

Contact Toshiba for a disk.

 

[JDFan]

DOes the HDD have a second partition on it ?? nowadays instead of providing a recovery disk the make a hidden partition on the HDD with a copy of the system as it was when first shipped and using one of the function keys while booting will bring up an option to restore the system to factory defaults (thing is doing that resets it to the original factory settings so you lose anything you've added since then so will have to reinstall your programs etc.

Have you tried booting into safe mode and then logging in as the Administrator (sometimes the admin account will only show up in safe mode) - If it does not have a password set for it you may be able to get in that way and then reset the user password on her account.

Also after entering an incorrect password it should give you a hint to what the password is on the login screen (if she added that when setting up the password so maybe that will help her remember the password she used !)

EDIT : Here is a guide for how to access the hidden partition on a Toshiba laptop that may be useful if you can not remember the password or access the admin account to reset her user password.

Also I would suggest after you get it running again setup a second user account with Admin priveledges and a password you will remember in case this happens again ! (so you can use it to reset her password if ever needed )