xp home syskey and xp professional recovery console-registry problem

[poster]

After probably registry corruption toshiba satellite wont boot even to
safe mode,
so tried recovery console from an available xp pro cd because the
toshiba disk is a Recovery cd that offers only full reinstall.However
xp pro recovery console will not accept a blank admin pass to 'enter'
windows so used a tool to setup-change pass which says pass is syskey
protected
1.What if syskey is disabled(by the http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
, tool)-will it be still possible to set up admin pass to be able to
use xp pro cd recovery console to do registry repair as
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545
2.Since that cannot fix but input a first ever registry copy apps will
need to be reinstalled
so how about some better registry repair idea-make another partition
with xp pro in it and use some specialised reg repair software or
perhaps this would help
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
thanks in advance

 

[Sinbad The Sailor]

Anglomont,

If think you're jumping the gun with assuming it's something to do with the
registry. If your computer isn't even booting into safe mode or windows XP
then there may be something wrong with either your boot file or sector.

I don't know too much about syskey unfortunately, but did you already try
'password' as the password?

Thanks,

Sinbad

 

[Leonard Grey]

There is no "reg repair software" and, in general, you cannot run
software from the repair console.

In order to repair corrupted registry keys, you need to know
specifically which keys and subkeys were corrupted and what the correct
data should be.

In your case, you need to erase your hard disk and start over.

 

[PeeCee]

After probably registry corruption toshiba satellite wont boot even to
safe mode,
so tried recovery console from an available xp pro cd because the
toshiba disk is a Recovery cd that offers only full reinstall.However
xp pro recovery console will not accept a blank admin pass to 'enter'
windows so used a tool to setup-change pass which says pass is syskey
protected
1.What if syskey is disabled(by the
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/
, tool)-will it be still possible to set up admin pass to be able to
use xp pro cd recovery console to do registry repair as
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545
2.Since that cannot fix but input a first ever registry copy apps will
need to be reinstalled
so how about some better registry repair idea-make another partition
with xp pro in it and use some specialised reg repair software or
perhaps this would help
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
thanks in advance

If you cannot bypass the password issue I would suggest the 'quickest'
solution is to back the drive up (usb external caddies are good for this)
and run the Toshiba restore disk.
You are likely to spend 'many' hours working through the many possible
solutions to your problem, maybe even days and still not get if fixed.
Best to backup & restore.

Best
Paul.

 

[poster]

If you cannot bypass the password issue I would suggest the 'quickest'
solution is to back the drive up (usb external caddies are good for this)
and run the Toshiba restore disk.
You are likely to spend 'many' hours working through the many possible
solutions to your problem, maybe even days and still not get if fixed.
Best to backup & restore.

Best
Paul.

Thanks I ll do it to a newly made partition(no caddy available)
I wonder if passwords can be normally set up after the syskey is
disabled and if disabled syskey might affect xp performance?

 

[PeeCee]

Thanks I ll do it to a newly made partition(no caddy available)
I wonder if passwords can be normally set up after the syskey is
disabled and if disabled syskey might affect xp performance?

Couple of comments:

Your Toshiba restore disk may not (probably not) allow you to restore to a
particular partition.
For your data to be safe you should delay restoration from your Toshiba Disk
until you have a decent backup/image.

This page http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/localsamcrack2 seems
to have an easy to follow set of intructions for cracking passwords Syskey
enabled or disabled.
Note Syskey just encrypts the SAM data base for extra security, with Syskey
off the password hash still resides in the SAM database so yes you can still
setup a password.
Syskey has been enabled by default in every version of Windows following NT4
SP3 (see link above) as it's only involved in encrypting the SAM database. I
don't see how it is going to have any affect on performance, after all you
only use it when you enter your password at system startup.

Best
Paul.