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Password recovery…

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One of my clients has a program called Contact Manager, by FDP/Vision and has lost his password. The company no longer supports the program. Any ideas on how to recover the password?

Thanks, in advance.

alan

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In reply to Password recovery…

Clarifications

How did your client “lose it”? …

In reply to Password recovery…

Was this a geographical occurrence or was it time-related.

Rather odd that any user would ‘lose’ a password for such a business-critical piece of software. When was the last time your client ever used this to access one of his contacts?

Of course, he could always just reinstall the software package and repopulate all his contacts from his Backup – he does [b]HAVE[/b] a backup, doesn’t he?

Backups? We don’t need no stinking backups!

In reply to How did your client “lose it”? …

Forgive the snide reference to “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” please! Yes, he has backups of the data, which I have migrated to Access; it’s the program itself. Here are the symptoms:

He has the login name and passwords; they just don’t work. Given the sensitivity of the data the program contains, I was astonished to find that the login was nothing more than the (up to three) initials of the agent, and the password only allowed for up to six characters. Ah, for the innocent days of Windows 95! The program, part of a package distributed by the now-defunct Mutual of New York insurance conglomerate, was marketed to insurance professionals back in the mid-to-late 90s and the gentleman in question (now in his mid-80s) cannot find the original disks.

When he closed his rented office and moved the remaining business to his home, he decided he would “clean up” his 19 Gb hard drive; that’s when the problems arose. Interestingly, all of the programs utilities appear on the hard drive; but when you go to open several of them by double clicking on their file names, the error message “File not found” displays. I asked if he had deleted any other Windows XP user accounts, on the off chance that the software might be tied to another account, and his answer was negative.

I have run Ontrack and recovered roughly 3.84 Gb of data; none of it is related to this software.

I know enough to know that at this point I am way out of my depth, which is why I am asking for suggestions here. There are no nefarious motivations on my part, or that of my client – the data are already recovered and available via Access. It is simply a matter of convenience. My client is used to the software and is of an age where learning a new means to send out “Hi, how are you?” and “Hi, ready to renew your insurance policy?” letters exceeds the law of diminishing returns.

By the way, emailing what is apparently the company that originally wrote and marketed the software has brought no response and, sadly, Mutual of New York is no more.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Alan Staats

Sungard Insurance

In reply to Backups? We don’t need no stinking backups!

Did MoNY get it after Sungard? Did a quick google and saw that Sungard had them in 2000, but not sure what happened after that

not sure either…

In reply to Sungard Insurance

FDP seems to have split up with one unit going to Sungard and another as a real estate VC investment entity in California.

Beyond that, I have no idea.

Alan

Additionally – TR members do not assist with password recovery.

In reply to Password recovery…

TR members do not assist with password recovery.
The members of TechRepublic – A Resource for IT Professionals, will not assist anyone in the recovery of lost passwords. You may have a legitimate reason to recover a password. However, we cannot verify your motives and will therefore not assist anyone in what may be an attempt at gaining unauthorized access to a computer system. Due to the open nature of this forum, any assistance given to help circumvent security measures, even for legitimate purposes, would be available for unscrupulous individuals to use for illegitimate purposes. This is a risk that we the members of TechRepublic will not take. Please do not ask questions of this nature on TechRepublic.

If you have a legitimate need to circumvent a password scheme, please contact the vendor for the software / hardware and request their assistance. E.g. Windows XP password recovery issues should be taken up with Microsoft’s technical support, Phoenix BIOS password recovery issues should be taken up with Phoenix Technologies, etc.. To those viewing this post: Please DO NOT respond any further to this thread.

This template has been released under the GNU public license and you are encouraged to use it as a standard reply for questions of similar nature, provided that you make any modifications available to other users.

[b]In your client’s present situation I suggest he does some serious brain-storming, or rebuilds the install and runs his backup.[/b]

[Author]

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