Old Bitcoin Laden Harddrive. With a Windows password blocking my access!

[CrashHash]

Who the F cares about a laptop from when I was around 19 and was... using Vista. 

ALL THAT'S KEEPING ME OUT IS A DAMNED WINDOWS LOGIN!

Ummmmm, how do I say this without "them" coming after me. Some.... Coins are likely on this laptop. Potentially 5-8 BT

To hell with it, I will out and say it.. If my memory serves me correctly, 5-8 BTC. (£200,000 / £320,000).

It's not a certainty, more like a 50/50 as theres 2 drives these 5-8 coins could be on, however several things point to this being it, but no need to go into that. Many, MANY people call complete BS on this story but to be honest, I don't really care, there is actually a very logical explanation as to why they were there/ Why I forgot about them/ and why I haven't jumped at the opportunity as of yet... Which I will most gracefully answer.

1)I was a dumb kid, I say kid now because I'm a fair fair fair bit older, but also was a rather well off kid, (My own doing, not mamas and papas money) and due to domestic abuse at home, several laptops were broken. At this time, The 5-8 coins were worth on the order of mid £200, to MAX maybe £500. However I had major major success entrepenurially and this money wasn't deemed like "I HAVE TO HAVE IT NOW". So I hid the (2) drives away, having elimited all the other drives from laptops that broke while being beaten by my older brother.

2) Why I forgot about them... Well, I didn't really. Nor has the money enraptured me in any meaningful way. I would love to purchase my parents the home I grew up in, and yes I will keep some, but by no, NO means to majority of it. I would start a business, ontop of already pledging a certain amount to all family members accept for my brother (Which he will receive, but not all at once, as  he is very very mentally unwell) 

3) Why I havent jumped at the oppertunity. Well, this is the toughest to answer, because I don't think I know the answer, maybe fear that I'm wrong, or something, because everyone BUT me cares a lot about this money, I wouldnt want to kms as many others might. (As I mentioned earlier there are 2 drives, only one boots right now, but evertything on the login screen does enforce the idea that it could be the extremely valuable HDD.)

It boots. I just don't know the effing password, hashcat would crack it in comically short about of times(IF hashcat can run on windows login, which is why I'm here), as every password I remember from this time, and even for a while after it im embarressed to say, was just a  word, maybe a number thrown in for MAX SECURITY!  

I honestly don't care if my next statement is not to be believed;

(By the way this has been my mentality ever since beginning planning) 

ANYONE who I can point to and say YOU helped me, regardless of if its small or large, I will pay you. Simply because I dont WANT this money that much, I would love to say thank you to anyone who took time out their day to help someone.

Sssure, I know people are thinking  "Yeah right", but I do mean it, hand to god - And if you don't believe me, tech forums are for tech help, so if I'm helped by a non believer... Well. A surprise will be in order.

Hashcat, I will make a generous donation to your organisation, also. I almost want you to not believe this, I know you would help regardless, so whether or not I'm telling the truth, is kind of irrelevant in the face of knowing I am telling the truth.

TLR;

Insane amount of money on a working HDD, just cant get past windows login. What do? As said. If hashcat is the thing to get me in, I will donate heavily to the site, and some members who replied with the most useful answers.

God speed, Hashcat & co  

Regards.

CrashHash.

Mwah.

[Banaanhangwagen]

I do not think this is the right place for your question.
If anything is true about your explanation, it will not be that hard to find the pwd by yourself.
Use Google.

[philsmd]

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)