how do i recover my files

Take the harddrive from the locked out workstation and hang it from another PC. Provided it's an NT or 2000 box, you'll be able to read the data from the drive and copy it elsewhere. If there are permissions problems, you can take ownership of thefiles and folders first.

Yes you can setup a dual boot configuration to resolve this problem. If you have another partition on the current hard drive with enough space or install another hard drive in the system. Install Windows NT to the second partition/drive, boot to thenew (recovery) partition and take ownership of the files you want to backup. At that point you can copy them to another location or burn them to a CD.

The second choice is to pull the hard drive out of the system and put it into another NT system. Which may save you some time if you have another NT system available. Either server or workstation will work.

Depending on the resources available, you could just reinstall nt/2000 into another directory on the same partition. Encrypted files may be a problem, but anything else will be fine, just take ownership.

There is another option as well, www.sysinternal.com, they have a number of freeware and commercial utilities for various operating systems. On of the utilities is a freeware DOS NTFS driver (read-only), the commercial version will allow you to write. There is also a utility to access themachine from a serial connection and reset the Administrator Password.

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