Cannot logon

[Guest]

This is on an XP home edition PC. There are two user accounts, Bob (admin
account) and Administrator, both do not have a password.

The user cannot logon to the system using either user account. Get the
standard error message about password, domain etc. User Bob is setup to
automatically logon.

What the user now sees is a Welcome Screen without any user account to
select. Pressing the Ctrl-Alt-Del keys will bring up the security logon
dialog box, but the system will not allow logon.

I have not tried Last Known Good. Also, this PC can be upgraded to XP Pro if
all applications will remain and the upgrade will bypass the failed
logon...since a new administrator account will be created.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Try booting into Safe Mode and logon as the built in administrator account
which may have a blank password. Upgrade installs do not create any user
accounts or change any user passwords. The built in administrator account
already exists on the computer. --- Steve

 

[Guest]

I did try Safe Mode, same result. Windows logon screen with no user accounts
listed, tried both accounts (Bob and built-in Administrator, no password) and
cannot logon.

These user accounts never had a password. Also tried LKG.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

To me it sounds like someone or some process configured a password for those
accounts. See the link below on how to proceed for when a user forgets their
administrator password and how to reset it to see if that helps. --- Steve

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm

 

[Guest]

I will try that but it won't be until tomorrow. I will let you know what
happens.

Robert

 

[Guest]

Well, I ran two of the password recovery tools and they both said they could
not find users. Guess the registry got corrupt, anyway around this? Before,
the re-install?

Robert

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Hmm. You could try to copy the sam file from the windows\repair folder to
the \windows\system32\config folder
after renaming the original sam file to sam.old. You would have to do that
from outside the operating system by placing your hard drive
in another computer as a secondary/slave drive or by booting from something
like Barts PE which is a compact version
of the operating system that fits on a cdrom. If you happen to be using
FAT32 file system you could do that
from a bootable floppy. --- Steve

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ --- Bart's PE information.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your help, I decided to perform a re-install after discovering
this system has had some recent history of instability.

Nothing better than a clean install.