One of the things I have been doing is looking at digital files…stuff on hard drives or other media. I found about 20 backup hard drives around the house, and dozens, of thumb drives. It takes a long time to install and browse that much digital information. Since most of them were in use well before a year ago, I also wanted to look at his computers. The police took his most current computers…several laptops and several tablets. I’ve been told they hope to be able to return them to me next week. But they missed two slightly older computers that were in a bag in the small room next to his bedroom, under a bunch of other stuff. So I started looking at those a few days ago.
Since I didn’t have his account login information I removed the hard drives and used adapting cables to connect them to my laptop as external hard drives. The both had the Windows OS on them, and one had a lot of work files on it. I copied that information to a 4 TB drive I brought along. The fact that the other one had just the OS on it made me suspect that it was dual boot to Linux. So I returned it to its home and opened to the boot choice screen. It did have a Linux partition and I could boot to the sign in page, but couldn’t get past that page without his login. I tried a dozen of the ones I knew (mostly combinations of the names of his dogs, his girlfriend, and his dad) and none worked…not much like the movies where the detective or thief guesses it the first time.
But I was pretty sure there was a way around this, so I asked my good friend google to help. I got about a million hits involving complex methods…and then one very simple approach that worked like a charm. Rather than trying to hack the password I dropped down to a lower level and edited the file that contained the password, replacing it with a new one. I ended up doing it four or five times just to document the process in my own words. By the end it took just a minute or so to do.
I found a similar process for changing the Windows password. I’m not going to go into detail on how this is done…but if you want to know Google will tell you.
This seems like a major security flaw, but as someone explained, you can do it only if you have physical possession of the computer. And it you had that you could just take the hard drive out like I did and plug it into a computer running Linux…which I didn’t have until that point.
I had never used Linux…I came up through CP/M, MS-DOS, and then all the versions of Windows. This machine ran Linux Mint 17.2 or so. It is conceptually a lot like Windows.
Scott always had computers that ran Windows, as he needed to be sure his code would run on it…but he liked to do his actual work in Linux…that is where he was comfortable.
I think I should point out that what I am trying to do on this trip is clean up Scott’s estate and help it go through probate so various people can get on with leading their lives. I’m not trying to solve the mystery of whether Scott was murdered or committed suicide. The police spent two and a half months trying to do that. What I want to get out of this personally is some understanding of what was going on with Scott…what he was thinking about and what he wanted to do.