Harry,

It was a long shot to ask and I respect that you do not wish this discussed here.

I realise that this isn't much in the way of reassurance, I am genuine and do have legal access to the machine in question. I have taken on a system which has never been administered and the laptop was discovered in storage, with a note attached "don't know the password". Having all the disks and keys separated and zero records being kept of anything, I was hoping to gain access without a full re-install.

I will respect your wishes and will not persue this further.

For Krishna's curiosity I will PM the link to what I did (so as not to link it here).