just to make this forum thread a little bit more useful also for people with similar problems:
it depends a lot if the hard drives are encrypted (we call this full disk encryption in general, but you could also have only parts of the drives encrypted, only some partition for instance).
In general, unless you intentionally have used a software like Bitlocker / VeraCrypt / TrueCrypt etc, the disk isn't completely encrypted (full disk encrypted)...
If the disk / partiion / files are not encrypted, you of course have free access to the underlying file system and files (of course even in this case, you could have intentionally encrypted only some files, your wallet file could itself be encrypted etc... but these are all special cases, not the "usual" way files are stored):
1. you could just mount the disk / partition (READ ONLY) within another operating system and just search for the files
2. you could just replace the windows login files (SAM file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Account_Manager) AFTER making a BACKUP of the whole disk with a different password (see something like https://opensource.com/article/18/3/how-...word-linux). Yeah, the login files of a windows computer can just be just replaced (with a known password or empty password) if the disk is not full disk encrypted
Again, I want to stress out again that it's always required and worth to make a full backup of the whole disk. Just in case that anything goes wrong. hard disks (yeah, even old HDDs, no modern SSD is needed here, except if you are very in a hurry etc, but the speed of making a backup is quite fast and depends on both disk speeds of course, so the bottleneck could be the speed of the old disk even with a new SSD) .... do not cost a lot anymore and are definitely a good investment especially if you are dealing with recovering some very important data. Just make a backup, believe me, you can play around and analyze/change the (login) data much more calmly when you have a 1 to 1 copy of the whole disk.
When you have a full copy of the data, you could of course use this clone of the disk to do your file search or login data modifications.... (in theory you could now also use the original disk, because they should be the same now. It's needless to say that at least 1 of the 2 disks need to remain the same, unmodified. They act like a new recovery disk in case of a (new) problem/emergency. That said, I think the general approach/rule is to not touch the original disk anymore after a backup was done and use a copy instead if you really need to make any changes.... again the file search approach doesn't really require any changes and works also with a READ ONLY mounted disk).
Good luck to everyone having the same kind of problem and not knowing exactly what would be possible and recommended to do and what not !
of course, if all of this is too complicated and above your skills, you can still try to ask a friend or a professional data recovery company (you just shouldn't really mention that you have a lot of BTC in a wallet file on the disk, just mention that you need a 1:1 copy and a reset of the windows password or similar)
it depends a lot if the hard drives are encrypted (we call this full disk encryption in general, but you could also have only parts of the drives encrypted, only some partition for instance).
In general, unless you intentionally have used a software like Bitlocker / VeraCrypt / TrueCrypt etc, the disk isn't completely encrypted (full disk encrypted)...
If the disk / partiion / files are not encrypted, you of course have free access to the underlying file system and files (of course even in this case, you could have intentionally encrypted only some files, your wallet file could itself be encrypted etc... but these are all special cases, not the "usual" way files are stored):
1. you could just mount the disk / partition (READ ONLY) within another operating system and just search for the files
2. you could just replace the windows login files (SAM file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Account_Manager) AFTER making a BACKUP of the whole disk with a different password (see something like https://opensource.com/article/18/3/how-...word-linux). Yeah, the login files of a windows computer can just be just replaced (with a known password or empty password) if the disk is not full disk encrypted
Again, I want to stress out again that it's always required and worth to make a full backup of the whole disk. Just in case that anything goes wrong. hard disks (yeah, even old HDDs, no modern SSD is needed here, except if you are very in a hurry etc, but the speed of making a backup is quite fast and depends on both disk speeds of course, so the bottleneck could be the speed of the old disk even with a new SSD) .... do not cost a lot anymore and are definitely a good investment especially if you are dealing with recovering some very important data. Just make a backup, believe me, you can play around and analyze/change the (login) data much more calmly when you have a 1 to 1 copy of the whole disk.
When you have a full copy of the data, you could of course use this clone of the disk to do your file search or login data modifications.... (in theory you could now also use the original disk, because they should be the same now. It's needless to say that at least 1 of the 2 disks need to remain the same, unmodified. They act like a new recovery disk in case of a (new) problem/emergency. That said, I think the general approach/rule is to not touch the original disk anymore after a backup was done and use a copy instead if you really need to make any changes.... again the file search approach doesn't really require any changes and works also with a READ ONLY mounted disk).
Good luck to everyone having the same kind of problem and not knowing exactly what would be possible and recommended to do and what not !
of course, if all of this is too complicated and above your skills, you can still try to ask a friend or a professional data recovery company (you just shouldn't really mention that you have a lot of BTC in a wallet file on the disk, just mention that you need a 1:1 copy and a reset of the windows password or similar)