I have an office with a bunch of OEM XP (Pro) installations, but I also have
some computers that are on Open Licensing. Anyway, this week one of the
computers started to have problems. The system log told me it was a hard
drive issue, i.e. "hard drive 1 has a bad block". So I ran a chkdsk /f and
rebooted - and that's where the problems began.

After running the chkdsk, I couldn't access any programs - not even Control
Panel. Essentially, everything would open for a split second and then
either close again, or freeze.

So I decided to run a Repair from the XP Pro CD. Here's where I made my big
mistake. This computer was one of the computers on the volume license, NOT
one of the computers on an OEM license, but I accidentally put in an OEM
disk and started the Repair. When I got to the point where it needed the
license key, the key I put in (which was the Open License) wouldn't work.

The problem (as you guys probably know) is that now the XP Repair is stuck.
Every time I boot up from the hard drive, it restarts the Repair. To
compound the problem, I can't go into the Recovery console, because there's
no documentation on what the administrator password is.

My question (of course) is: do I have any way of cancelling this XP Repair,
so I can restart the Repair again with the correct CD? Should I put in an
OEM license key to get this thing up and running, or would that cause more
problems (apart from the fact that another computer most likely has that
license already)?

Also, if anyone can tell me what I could have done differently (other than
using the wrong CD, that is), I'd appreciate it too.



Shannon

Well even if a "fix" was able to get xp back to normal,you'd probably start
having the same pc problems with a bad hard drive."Bad block" usually
refers to "bad sectors",a non fixable problem.Why not replace the hd &
start from scratch with all fixed properly....

"Shannon Rotz" wrote:

> I have an office with a bunch of OEM XP (Pro) installations, but I also have
> some computers that are on Open Licensing. Anyway, this week one of the
> computers started to have problems. The system log told me it was a hard
> drive issue, i.e. "hard drive 1 has a bad block". So I ran a chkdsk /f and
> rebooted - and that's where the problems began.
>
> After running the chkdsk, I couldn't access any programs - not even Control
> Panel. Essentially, everything would open for a split second and then
> either close again, or freeze.
>
> So I decided to run a Repair from the XP Pro CD. Here's where I made my big
> mistake. This computer was one of the computers on the volume license, NOT
> one of the computers on an OEM license, but I accidentally put in an OEM
> disk and started the Repair. When I got to the point where it needed the
> license key, the key I put in (which was the Open License) wouldn't work.
>
> The problem (as you guys probably know) is that now the XP Repair is stuck.
> Every time I boot up from the hard drive, it restarts the Repair. To
> compound the problem, I can't go into the Recovery console, because there's
> no documentation on what the administrator password is.
>
> My question (of course) is: do I have any way of cancelling this XP Repair,
> so I can restart the Repair again with the correct CD? Should I put in an
> OEM license key to get this thing up and running, or would that cause more
> problems (apart from the fact that another computer most likely has that
> license already)?
>
> Also, if anyone can tell me what I could have done differently (other than
> using the wrong CD, that is), I'd appreciate it too.
>
>
>
> Shannon
>
> .
>