WinXP Home - All User Accounts Lost

  • Thread starter Thread starter larryU
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larryU

My son called from college, said that after he rebooted his WinXp Home
machine there were no User Accounts listed on the Welcome Page.
Usually he gets his account listed because he has a password. He tried
to use the Administrator's account by ctl-alt-del but the blank
password is not working today (it did in the past).

He has tried to do a 'repair' installation from the CD but it wants
the Administrator's account and password as well.

He is trying to reboot the machine with a Win2000 CD, hoping the
recovery console will help him.

I have found the links to ERD Commander but am looking for a less
expense ($199) solution. Next on the list is the boot disk at
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/.

Any other solutions that you can suggest will be appreciated. Also,
what do you think has happened to his machine? It is a year old Dell,
is this a hard drive problem, a virus/worm, or ?

thanks
larry
 
XP Home has never supported the CTRL-ALT-DEL trick at the Welcome Screen for
the Administrator account. For XP Home, you must boot the computer into
Safe Mode to access this account. By default, XP home does not prompt you
for an Administrator password at setup, so for Recovery Console, try leaving
it blank. Also, if he has a full version of XP Home, the CD is bootable as
well, and has its own Recovery Console.
 
Whatever you do, do NOT boot the XP machine with a Win 2000 CD. You'll
screw it up.
 
Doug

He did try to login in safe mode with the admin account,
and tried from the cd to perform a recovery repair. Did
not work with the blank password. But the blank password
has worked in the past, but he has not used it recently.

But, I just talked to him again and he reminded me of
something I forgot in my posting. The error he is getting
when he puts the user name/password in contains the
phrase "handle is invalid". He gets that error when he
enters his user account name, as well as the
administrator account.

One option we are thinking of is to upgrade him to WinXP
Pro. Hopeful that the upgrade will 'fix' the problem and
not ask him for the admin password. Any thoughts/comments
on this plan would be appreciated.

larry
 
The upgrade tends to keep user accounts and settings in place. I wouldn't
count on it correcting a password issue, but it might.
 
Doug

Thanks for the quick reply.

Any guesses on 'handle is invalid'? Seems to me like some
link is broken in the security process.

BTW, the linux program was able to see his account and
the administrator's account. He reset the administrator's
account to a non-blank value but still gets the error.

There must be a better fix than to reload/upgrade the OS?
If the upgrade to Pro does not help, is a clean install
the only other option? I did read about a registry
setting that will show/hide a user account on the Welcome
Page but I don't know how to change the registry if we
can't logon.

Thanks for your help
larry
 
Its virtually impossible to edit the Registry if you can't logon, but check
the password reset disk you used. I think I remember seeing something about
a registry editing function on it (been awhile).
 
Doug

Thanks again for your help. I started with Google with no
luck except for Photoshop errors.

Do you think it is a registry problem or a supporting
file? I found a good article (307545) in MSDN for
restoring the registry from a previous restore point. But
I am not sure this is a registry problem.

larry
-----Original Message-----
Try a search at www.google.com or
Click to expand...
http://groups.google.com for the exact
 
It could be a reference to a security descriptor, or it could be a program
error. I really don't know, Larry. :(
 
thanks again for your help.

unfortunately we seem to have little choice but to install
a clean copy of WinXP :(
 
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