Getting into a Gold Disk-locked laptop and scanning a laptop not set up with network connectivity

Back from testing. It was a packed couple of days, and we worked in a pretty tough environment. Anyway, we had two sets of laptops that Retina could not scan, as it couldn't connect to the registry; even when we had the correct admin user name and password.

In the first case, we needed to scan two laptops that were not connected to the network. We had crossover cables, and we tried running the scans; each time though, we couldn't connect to the registry. My co-worker came up with a good trick. Because the laptops were in a workgroup, we were able to run the network setup. From there we ran the wizard, picked home network, but didn't actually set up anything. The process installs and starts the "server" service which allows the sharing of the drive. After that, we were able to run our scan and connect to the registry.

The second case presented an interesting problem. Again, we couldn't connect to the registry. However, this time, a little investigating turned up the cause. The client had run Gold Disk on the machine, and immediately clicked "remediate" when Gold Disk was finished. Yep, they locked up the box something good. Logging in to the machine from the network was not possible. To fix this, we went to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Policies -> Security Options. From there, allow network login access.