I looked up the manual, and reset the BIOS password by moving the jumper on the motherboard, booting, then resetting the jumper, and rebooting, which worked.

To adjust this, I tried taking out the CMOS battery for a few seconds (amazing that these batteries still work, so many years later), but the password remained. The boot device order was controlled by the BIOS password. However, the savvy previous owner had reset the password.

2001 was truly a wild-west time in computer security. Yes, Windows XP set up everyone up with an empty-string backdoor by default. I tried logging in with the default empty-string hidden Windows XP Administrator account by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice at the login screen, then logging in as Administrator/''. I thought it might be fun to chronicle the challenges faced below. Usually, booting is pretty straightforward: flash a USB drive to the latest Ubuntu live ISO, boot from USB, image the disk to network storage with dd, or even just cat, then mount the disk read-only to browse.īut this wasn't so easy - it got a bit ridiculous, and it dredged up some tricks I hadn't used for decades. So I had to boot the machine to get the data out. The disk drive is parallel-ATA, so I don't have a handy external-hard-drive-case/USB adapter for it. The machine has USB ports, two 10/100 ethernet cards, DVD-RW drive, CD-RW drive, and a floppy drive. Recently, I had to extract some data from a 2002-era Dell Dimension 4550 desktop, running Windows XP Home edition, with a few password-protected user accounts, but no full-disk encryption. If I was doing this again, I'd consider: Puppy Linux, far more up-to-date, supports 32-bit, fits on a CD, can choose to be based off Debian packages. Ubuntu Oneiric, at 695MB, is the newest 32-bit graphical Ubuntu live image that will fit on a 700MB CD-R. Yes, 'CD', not USB, not network-boot, not DVD.

Small ubuntu iso live cd