Richards said:
Ok i know all about safe mode and stuff like that. I am not a newbie when
it
comes to computers. Let me explain in more detail whats going on.
By the way it is XP Home edition. My wife bought it at a BEst Buy a couple
of years ago and they set it up for her. They gave her the login name of
"home" with no password assigned. She had never done updates on it. When i
got a hold of it it needed over 60 critical updates. All those went fine.
I
finally got around to installing the service pack 2 about 2 or 3 days ago.
I
let it install and reboot like normal and everything was fine. So i shut
it
down and left it for her till the next day since i did this late at night.
When she went to start up the computer the next day she said she couldnt
log
in. I checked it out and at the Welcome Screen where you normally have the
little icon with the user name next to it isnt there. The only thing you
can
click on is "turn off Computer". There is nothing else. pressing
crtl+alt+del
a couple of times brings up a xp pro style login which i tried again to
log
in under. neither her "home" login or the admin login will work. I have
tried
safe mode and its the same thing. Its dumbfounding to say the least. I
have
never seen anything like this. If you need more info let me know.
Ok but your post didn't state whether you had tried Safe Mode. Had you
tried Safe Mode before posting your original question?
It's still no clear what all you have tried. For XP Home the only way to
login to the built in Administrator account is through safe mode; I gather
from your post that that no accounts show up on the Welcome Screen in Safe
Mode either, right? Does ctrl-al-del twice in Safe Mode bring up the
classic login box? Did you try Administrator as the account and leaving the
password blank?
If that doesn't work, but in Safe Mode you can bring up the classic login
box then I think it's worth a shot to reset the password on the built in
Administrator account.
I would ask first if the data is backed up. If not do that first. Here are
some options on how to do that.
1. Take the drive out of the computer and install it as a slave drive in
another Windows XP or 2000 computer. It should read the drive ok, so you can
copy the data.
2. Create a bootable Bart's PE disk, boot from that, then copy the data to
external USB drive or flash drive.
3. Download a bootable Linux distro called Knoppix. Create a bootable CD
from that, boot from it, and copy the data to USB drive or flash drive, or
if the computer has two CD drives, one of which is a burner, then use the
k3b burning program on the Knoppix CD to burn the data to CD.
4. Take it to a competent computer tech to backup the data.
After that I would try the password utility I posted to reset the password
on the built in Administrator account to see if you can login in Safe Mode.
Unfortunately I've seen a few cases posted where that didn't work either.
If that's no go here is an article on how to remove SP2. If the system
won't boot then the only option to try in this article is the recovery
console method.
How to remove Windows XP Service Pack 2 from your computer
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=875350
If that doesn't work the options are fast decreasing. Unless someone else
can come up with some suggestions the next steps would be a repair install,
and if that's no go, then of course a clean install.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html