>If the partitions are using the FAT file system, you can boot off of a dos or win9x floppy and get to the data. If they are ntfs, you can pull the drive and mmake it the secondary drive of another NT (or Linux) machine.
>
>I wonder what whould happen if you reinstalled NT?
>

Unless you blow away the registry, the passwords remain the same. If you do a complete reinstall of NT, sacrificing the registry content, then you can reset the Admin password, but you'll lose other things defined to NT.

I use ERD Commander Pro for recovery operations (it ain't cheap, but it does let you do stuff like redefine the Admin password) and the people at Winternals sell less-capable tools that'll allow the same thing as far as the password alone. This is a quote from the On-Line help for ERD Commander Pro describing what it does:

When problems arise in Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 that render a system unbootable, there is always the possibility of booting off of a DOS floppy disk so that the drives of the machine can be accessed for repair and salvage. This boot-floppy approach to system recovery is often the only way to correct problems that even “automatic” system repair utilities fail to correct. In the past, Windows NT administrators have gone without this recovery option. ERD Commander finally brings boot-floppy functionality to Windows NT.

ERD Commander is a utility that enables you to boot NT off of a floppy disk in order to access and repair a dead NT installation. It is a command-line shell that runs off of a set of NT boot disks giving you full access to non-bootable NT systems with a robust set of familiar command-line file manipulation tools including copy, rename, delete, move and xcopy. Because ERD Commander relies on a standard set of NT boot floppies, any NT system is accessible, and because ERD Commander runs on top of NT, all NT file systems, including FAT, NTFS, and CDFS are visible. Note that ERD Commander has no reliance on data located on a system's hard disk for it to boot and run - NT is actually booted on the floppies. Thus, NT does not even have to present on the computer in order to use ERD Commander to access the computer's drives, assuming that they are FAT or NTFS.

ERD Commander Professional Edition is a version of ERD Commander that augments the basic set of functionality with advanced features. These features include an expand command and a chkdsk command. The expand command makes it possible to extract compressed files on an NT distribution CD onto a hard drive from within ERD Commander, and with the chkdsk command you can perform consistency check and repair of hard drives. With ERD Commander Professional Edition you can easily disable or enable drivers or services in a NT installation on hard drive with the services command, or access the fault tolerant drives defined for an installation, including mirrors, volume sets, stripe sets and stripe sets with parity. Finally, the password command will let you change account passwords so that you can regain entry into a system that you’ve been locked out of, and support for FAT32 drives is built-in.

ERD Commander works on NT 4.0 only.

>>Ed, do you know how to bypass the login screen on an NT workstation if the user (and everyone else for that matter) can't locate the password? Thanks.