[oldschool69]

Help:

Wife has a Toshiba Satellite M30-S350, Centrino Laptop given to her when she quit work last year, it has seen some rough days but still works...somewhat. More about that later...

she used it here at home off and on ...and we eventually saved a few important files on this laptop. Now...when I try to boot up the "normal" way (just power on and wait), it goes RIGHT to a BSOD that reads
"Stop c000021a unknown hard error
unknown hard error"

alright...so I thought I would try to login via Safe Mode. No BSOD but now it brings me to the Windows XP Pro Logon box, where you type in your user name and password. It populates the username field with my wife's old user name from when she was working. When we type in the password....it won't log us in. SHe is pretty sure the password she is inputting is the right one but it has been over a year. So, I tried to log in Safe Mode Command Prompt. STILL comes to the XP Logon dialog box. Can't even get to the Welcome screen where you can select a user. (i.e. Administrator)

We don't want to pay out the wazoo for someone to run some data recovery software for us. We want to try to bypass use of a password at the Logon box altogether....if possible. The files we saved on this thing are pretty important and the laptop still has life in it (we hope) But YOU GUYS are the experts...please help.

[Yamikotai]

You could take the hard drive out of the laptop, and stick it in another computer; then you'll be able to access the files while logged into the other computer.

[Mak213]

Right in our read first thread:

Windows Password Reset Disks/Tools etc.

That should do the trick.