I'm away from home for college, and my computer back home has been having some issues. My dad took it to a computer store, and apparently the user profiles somehow got corrupted, so they're locked out of the computer. This is a Windows XP box, but I changed the default administrator account password, so that backdoor isn't a possibility.

Now, that computer's HDD has a whole bunch of data on it which my dad would hate to lose, so I suggested that they take the HDD out, plug it into some other computer, and just copy all the data off that way (keeping in mind that the data itself wasn't encrypted). However, the computer store people said that wouldn't be possible unless they had the administrator account password (which I can't remember for the life of me), and that they'd either have to reformat and reinstall Windows, or else use some complicated sounding recovery process costing a decent amount of money. That sounds like complete BS to me, but I'm not 100% sure about it, so I thought I'd get some more opinions. Could someone more knowledgeable about this stuff suggest a good course of action to take?