Unknown password grieving daughter [duplicate]

Here are some ideas that come to mind if you can't successfully guess his password, which may be written on a sticky note nearby, or in a nearby notebook or filing cabinet. These require some level of technical expertise, and rely on him NOT encrypting either his home directory or his entire hard drive.

• See if there's a "switch user" option from the lock screen; if so, click on that & look for an option to log in as "guest". Once you're in, try using the file browser to get into /home/ , and drill down into whatever account looks most promising . I'm leaving out details here because a guest login usually isn't present, and even if so, his home directory may not allow access for a guest account. No sense getting into weeds on a long shot.

• If no luck there, reboot his machine. If a password prompt comes up very early (<10 seconds?) and looks like simple colored text, then it's likely a BIOS password, and you should move to the next option below. But if it takes a bit (at least 30 seconds?) and looks fancy, it sounds like it's a password prompt from the operating system. If that's the case, you can try to boot the machine from a "Live USB" operating system, which will allow you to browse around your dad's hard drive without using his password-protected account. Instructions on creating the USB image are at https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#1-overview , and booting it is described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick/bootUSB .

• Lastly, you might be able to pull the hard drive from his machine, and plug it into your own laptop/desktop with a USB adapter. Then you can access his hard drive from your own computer.

I suppose there are data recovery services you could try; they'd probably do the last option above, & send you a zipfile of what they could retrieve. (Usually "data recovery" is for hard drives that have malfunctioned, but you might get a discount rate for a functioning hard drive.)