How do I unlock my hard drive

I would try this first. If you know how? Take out the hard drive from the computer be it desktop / laptop and place it in an external bay - once you can access the drive via another computer - I would backup the data off the hard drive. Once that is done, place the drive back into the computer and use a LINUX CD and try booting up accessing it. I normally use UBUNTU and or KNOPPIX.

Would love to know how this go...

Also, you can use HIREN to boot up the computer, access partition magic delete the partitions on the hard drive and format it. After all the restart the computer and try to install back your OS - be it VISTA or WIN7 (or WIN8).

hey mayer - ops! that is a whole different ball game. I'll drop him a line on that in a few...