So to make a long ass story short I got my laptop back today and the person that had it decided to put in a different hard drive because the one that was in it had a virus on it...why they swapped it out for this one is beyond me because it wouldn't have been to hard to remove the virus...anyways the hard drive that they put in is password protected so when you turn on the laptop it asks for a password before it will begin booting windows...after ****in around with it for a lil bit I realized that after three failed attempts at the password it seems to allow some access to the computer but says that the hard drive cannot be read or some ****. It does allow the option to boot from a cd tho so I booted from a linux live cd and it now allows me to use a version of linux so I can use the computer...anyways my question is does anyone know of a way to get around the password or maybe a program I can use to figure out the password while using linux? I am also able to boot up a program thats called windows xp mini version or some **** which is basically a watered down version of XP so if anyone knows of a program I can use on windows to get around the password thats possible too...hopefully I'll be able to get my old hard drive back because I know how to fix the virus on that one and then all this mess would be over with but it would be cool if I could get this hard drive figured out because its almost 100gigs bigger than the original one...any help is very much appreciated