My niece called to say that the wife of a friend of hers had died and her husband does not know the password for her laptop and wants to see if there is any important information on the machine. I drove into town with my best Linux ware to do the rescue.

I expected to simply boot it with the Pasword Resetter disk and reset the password like I do XPs. Nope. It could not find a single partition.

So I booted up with Fedora 8 Live in root. I could see many things on the 80 gig drive, but Documents and Settings opened to show an empty window. The properties on it said the contents were 0. But I could see other filders, such as My Documents, All Users, Program Files, Windows, etc. My Documents, All Users, Defalult User and such all shows now contents, and are actually located within Documents and Settings, showing up outside only as a link. But the fact that they show up at all means there is something inside that Documents and Settings folder.

The woman used her computer every day, and died with it on her lap, or I would think the folder had been emptied. But because it is Vista, which I have little experience with, but know borrowed heavily from Linux, I thought I should ask here before telling her that it is empty and to restore to factory defaults.

If encryption were used, would I see anything?
Is it possible to have the permissions set such that Fedora Live in root cannot see anything?

My fear is that the data is there and protected, and that if I succeed in resetting the password, it will still be gone because it needs the original password to un-encrypt. Or these files are hidden in a way that Linux cannot see them. Or that the permissions are set in such a way that Linux root cannot see them, like "root squash" with nfs.

Can someone with experience with Vista tell me what may be going on with this ?

Any help will be very much appreciated.

If data is encrypted you need the key. Well, usually the pass phrase; the key is there, but encrypted with a passphrase. People often write these down somewhere or put it in a clear file (or protect it with a 'password tracker' so they only have to remember 1 pass phrase).

Many directories are 'virtual' and the real directory resides somewhere else, just as for Win2k and XP.

One thing you may try is to attach the disk to another machine running Vista and browse through with that - at least in that case, encrypted files/directories will be shown to you with a special icon.