I need to access my files on my laptop, and it is a long story how I lost acess to them.
I am a college student and I have a few servers I am playing with but I guess do not know enough about windows yet.
I set up a domain, on my main server, but found that that makes the file server slow, so I moved it to another server.
I later reformatted that server (to make it faster with a RAID 0 array but my raid card was gay and odd things happened like wondows formatted the disk in 10 seconds), and lost all the domain info, and re-created the domain, but I didn't let my laptop conect to it.
The usernames and domain name were the same, however I used a different password for the account I use on my laptop so it wouldn't log in by accident or join to that domain ( I hoped).
I bought my first Domain name, Chadsdomain.org, and removed the domain and dns server roles from the domain controller.
I re made them a few hours later when my domain was activated with what seemed like default settings, and I went in and configured policy to make it annoying to steal my data or hack my network. The new domain had the same netbios name, as I had switched from mydomain.no-ip.org to mydomain.org.
My laptop was happy and didn't know all that happened, it seemed it just thought it was not on my network like when I go to class.
Then I restarted the computer and It would not log in after at least 15 attempts at the password I was using, many attempts at the new password on the new domain, and of course the administrator account and its password..
I unplugged the NIC and it let me log in with my user accoung on the old domain.
I went to a class, and forced the computer off with the power button for 5-7 seconds, and brought it back onto my network. Now it wouldnt log on with ANY passowrd, I found that ALL the accounts were disabled when I used a free online Password reset tool, It re-enabled the admin acct and reset the password, but I still couldn't log in with that admin acct. Also, the login box no longer had a plae to choose the domain and the advanced section contained only the option to shut down the pc, odd.
Now I cannot Get my files and I have tried:
Reset password with bootable password reset tool.
Hack my password, by emailing my self the sam and registry files with my syskey and all the passwords and getting the hash out with samdump. I couldnt crack it because it only saved the NT hash, rather than the old hash.
Use the knoppix cd I downloaded a year ago, which I couldn't figure out how to connect to my server and transfer the files. ( V.4 i think)
I took out the laptops hard drive and used my usb to ide cable from Newegg, and plugged it into the server.
The server recognised the drive after like 5 minutes, but it didnt shiow up in My Computer.
I went into Disk Management in Computer Management and saw the drive on the bottom list, not the top one. I right clicked it and it asked if I wanted to mount it on the MBR as disk 4 so I agreed. It then said HAHA I won't read this and to read more about it in the event log. I couldn't find the event in event viewer.
I am downloading Backtrack and some other programs now that should be able to get my files to my server but they will take a day or 2, so my question is:
What happened?
and how do I get my files back? because I have a job interview tomorrow and the location of it is in an e-mail on my computer.
