Hi,
I have been given a laptop to recover data from because it has become non-bootable. The customer will be purchasing a new laptop, and has requested that I recover the data so it can be imported when a new machine is obtained. I have the drive mounted in another computer and have access to all the files. It has been requested that I attempt to recover the passwords from the password manager. I can copy the norton password manager files from Program Files, but when I peruse the files with a text editor, I don't see anything that looks like passwords. I kind of doubt the passwords would be stored in these files anyway, seems they would be in a more inaccessible spot.
So far, I dont' see how this can be done without getting this drive to boot so I can run the program and export the file. However, that essentially means this 'data recovery' job is going to turn into a 'fix the laptop so I can do data recovery' job. Since I don't have the new machine, I can't dump the files into the same spot on the new computer and hope it sees everything. Especially since old machine is XP and new machine is almost certainly going to be vista, I doubt that would work even going XP to XP.
So, the question is, can the passwords be retrieved simply from the hard drive, without booting the os on the drive?