Please Help Beyond Simplicity

[Guest]

Hi, here's what happened. I installed SP2, worked fine for a while until I
decided I didn't like it. So I uninstalled SP2 through the control Panel, man
that was scary because I saw that it deleted a whole range of files, then
copying the original one back to before I installed SP2. Ok. So then the
computer automatically reboots, after that point my windows wouldn't load
again. It says it must run scandisk, so it does, it finds a few files that
look important, says they need to be truncated or whatever. But the meaning
of all this is, at the very end of scandisk, the computer will not load any
further. The screen goes black, actually it looks like the monitor goes into
standby or something. This now I cannot load windows, however, I can put in
my XP upgrade disc which I used to put XP on my comp, windows 98 was the
previous OS. Now I can find the recovery Console from that disc, however I
didn't have an Admin password, or if I did I forgot it. So now I hit enter
instead of entering a pass, and it allows me to sift through the harddrive.
Where do I go from there? Can I get that password for Admin? I don't have a
recovery password disc. I don't know how to recover the computer from DOS.
And I don't know why SP2 deleted some sort of file that makes my computer
stop loaded run when windows should go to the login screen? If you know what
I'm talking about, maybe its just one file I'm missing, or corrupt, or I can
reset the admin pass from DOS. Please something, I definitely tried to reload
windows from my XP upgrade disc, but it will not work. Clean install, or
repair, nothing goes past this black screen, my computer just hangs until I
reboot. Please help, I can't bring it to a professional or anything, I have
to fix it myself. Thank you so much for responding. Dan.

 

[Matthew Mucker [MSFT]]

Dan,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but this doesn't look good.

If Recovery Console allows you access to the disk without a password, it
means that the original operating system is so damaged that the recovery
console can't find what the password is supposed to be.

The only practical solution here is to reinstall the operating system.

However, you CAN still get data off this hard drive. If this is the only
hard drive you have in this machine, I suggest that you physically remove
the drive from the machine and put the drive in another machine running
Windows XP. Boot the other machine and you should be able to copy files
from your hard drive to a safe location.

If you have recent backups, it may be possible to recover the system. But
the details are simply too long and too unpredictable to put in a single
newsgroup post. You may wish to call Microsoft support for help if you're
desperately against rebuilding the machine.

-Matt

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