My apologies if this seems a little macabre, but… My brother recently and suddenly passed away and my family and I have been going through whatever we could access in order to trace his financial information so we could settle his estate. The paper trail gave us a lot of information to go on, but he did a lot of his personal business via computer. We have his computer, but it is a dual-boot linux/windows system with passwords on all of the accounts – and we have no way of knowing what the passwords were. (He was very computer savvy and would not have used simple passwords, even for his home computer network.) We want to be able to get into the computer to determine if there is any information that could help us (ie, personal documents, communications, and the like that could help us identify financial and legal information that doesn’t have an obvious or locatable paper trail). He prepared his tax returns with Windows software, and we found a program for preparing wills (but with no clear evidence that it had been used).
Is it possible to boot from a linux cd and access both the linux and windows data? Are there any tools that are available that may be of use? If we can’t find a way to access the information in a timely manner we are planning to wipe the drives and prepare the computers for resale, but the loss of potentially-helpful information is something I want to avoid.
If you do not wish to post links to cracking tools, please send the links to me directly.
Our thanks for any assistance that may be offered.
