I am not sure if I have the correct forum for this question, but ... I have a computer with only one login account with administrative rights. The login is kludged now that the registry value for the administrative user is messed up. When I try to log in, I get a message saying something to the effect of "The user profile service service failed the logon".  I looked it up on msdn and saw that I can fix it by changing the registry, but of course, I cannot do that because the bad user account is the administrative account.

The only thing that I need to retrieve from that hard drive is a sql server database.  Is there any way for me to do that, perhaps by putting the drive in a USB "sled" device and attaching it to a different computer as an external hard drive?  Will I be able to access the data folder where the database resides or will I get a message saying that I do not have permi

i think you should be able to do that..

what you are saying is - you are going to remove the drive that has sql data and log files and attach it to another computer either directly or usb device and copy the files on the new computer and attach the files on the new computer's sql instance..

this should work...make sure the nnew computer got sql version similar or higher to the old sql version.

Sounds like I have a chance.  SQL Server is installed on my C drive. I am concerned that when I try to open the data folder on the usb drive I will get a message saying I do not have permission to open the folder.  Do you think that would