Forgotten Password Windows 7 With A Twist - No way to boot from anything

I'm a software developer and not an IT pro, so please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong.

I offered to fix a friend's netbook, she locked herself out of windows 7 with forgotten password. I figured easy enough - I'll just boot into linux distro and apply any number of windows 7 password cracks. Problem is, I can't seem to figure out a way to boot into anything but the main hard drive.

It's a netbook. (Acer aspire one 722-BZ634) No cd/dvd drive.

Steps I took:

I make a bootable recovery usb key. (tested it, it works)
Try to make netbook boot from it. It won't automatically. Tried hitting f8 but no boot menu support. Tried hitting f12 but the usb drive is not among the list of choices to boot from.
Go to BIOS, it is password protected..... Uh oh.... Nobody knows the password.
I open the computer up looking for some CMOS jumpers to short together to reset the BIOS. I was unsuccessful at finding them. Researched online, and i found a company that is actually replacing the CMOS chips (presumably because there is no jumpers to short on these models?)

So, do any of you pros out there have any suggestions? Anything I am overlooking here?

My next step might be to disconnect the hard drive and hope that it automatically attempts to find a bootable drive and finds the usb drive.... But I've never disconnected a h/d on a tiny little netbook before, and it looks easy to break something.

user302498

Posted 2014-02-23T03:56:18.553

Reputation: 13

Answers

Doing a bit of research, you just need to remove the base and it has a standard hard drive inside it - here's a nice video on the process. In this specific scenario, The only sensible thing is to remove the drive, load it onto another system and either crack the password with something like ophcrack or the lovely chntpw to change the password

Journeyman Geek

Posted 2014-02-23T03:56:18.553

Reputation: 119 122

Thanks for the video, it was helpful. I took out the hard drive, but I'm not sure what adapter I need to connect it to a computer. – user302498 – 2014-02-23T11:08:30.957

Nevermind, it had some adapter already screwed into it that I didn't realize was a seperate unit. I took it off and exposed the standard SATA ports. – user302498 – 2014-02-23T11:14:25.457

Dear god! I can't reconnect the hard drive! The video doesn't show how to reconnect, and it is a very loose connection where nothing seems to snap into place... As a result, unless I tape the thing, it usually fails... Anyone know how I'm supposed to do this? – user302498 – 2014-02-24T00:19:22.823

I'd assume that the baseplate holds it in place, unless there's already double sided tape. – Journeyman Geek – 2014-02-24T03:29:42.043

Acer's tablets and netbooks are notorious for not being able to boot off USB devices. You can take the hard drive out and attach it to another computer via a SATA to USB adapter and use one of the many free password clearing/resetting tools out there.

As for the BIOS password, there should be a CMOS battery that you can pull and leave out for a while to clear it.

Keltari

Posted 2014-02-23T03:56:18.553

Reputation: 57 019

I took out the hard drive, but I don't recognize the connector. Any idea what to call the particular adapter that I need? – user302498 – 2014-02-23T11:07:41.953

If the Acer netbook is windows-based, it may have a recovery partition on the hard drive. Try the keypress combination of Alt+F10 at power on. You might be able to use this to reset the netbook to factory defaults, i.e. reinstall Windows. Be advised, this will erase everything on the hard drive.

Christopher N. Boisjoli

Posted 2014-02-23T03:56:18.553

Reputation: 205