I have a headache with this one.

My grand daughter had come over to the house a couple of weeks back, and I was letting her use my Windows 8 Home machine to play some games on. Some where during that day she managed to get into my Users Accounts and changed my password for Administration and my Local Account. When the computer turned off, it went into Hibernation (normal for Win 8) as it shut off.

Now I can't get back into my machine since the passwords do not agree.
I have tried to use several password discovery programs to get the password, and even tried the System Rescue Disk to wipe the password to log in. I figured if I could access the hard drive partition (/dev/sda5), I could delete the hiberfil.sys file. That way I could get into the computer and reset the passwords.

I keep hitting a wall at even trying to mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda5 -o force. The error message is about an unstable system because of hibernation. Does anyone know how to access a windows 8 system that is in hibernation?

Several possibilities including downloading some software at the link below. No idea if any of it works.

http://www.isunshare.com/windows-8-p...hout-disk.html

The page below is what microsoft has to say about it:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...#1TC=windows-8

Microsoft? You might be better off at the microsoft site or some windows forum for your windows problem. You won't be able to mount a windows partition from Linux that is in hibernation by design.

I don't use windows so I'm surprised your granddaughter could change your Administrator password. Good Luck.

Boot to windows dvd and try it's repair features.

I have been trying to use System Rescue Disk to correct it, but no go. I attempted to use my Debian Linux LiveCD to go in and force a mount to correct this (after the unstable system message) using mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda5 -o force but its a no go too. I also tried the iSunshare CD, but it won't open it either.

I asked this basic question of "how to get or bypass a password of a Windows 8 system" on a couple of windows forums AND on the Microsoft Support Forum. All Microsoft said was to re-install Windows 8. If I could get my personal data off the hard drive it would save me months of editing. And YES, I have a backup made, but it is on another partition of the hard drive and I have no access until I can get past this first problem of getting onto the hard drive. (When I bought the machine, a Geek divided a 2T HD into 4 partitions, with the last as my backup. And I have been showing my grand daughter how to use a computer since before she started school back in late XP days. How and why she got into my User Accounts to play around may have been from something she learned at school.)

I had figured that using Linux to force a mount should have worked where I could pull all my info off so I could re-install windows on that machine. (My laptop has 5 flavors of Linux so that one is cool.)

Have you tried mounting the second separate windows data partition, the one with your backup? No idea if it will work but you have nothing to lose unless you've already tried.

I don 't know of any Linux that will mount an ntfs partition that is hibernated but maybe someone else has different info.

I was attempting to use Linux to access any ntfs partition which is why I asked my question the way I did. I am not sure if the mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda5 -o force is correct or not.

No, it isn't. You don't have a mount point in the command. For the sake of simplicity, use the /mnt directory as the mount point if you are using the System Rescue CD. You need to be root and probably are if you are using System Rescue. If you see # at the prompt you're good.

You can try with or without the -o force and just use ntfs rather than ntfs-3g to see what happens. You don't indicate any other operating system so I am surprised you have your system files on a logical partition as windows usually installs to the first partitions on the drive.