Re: Can't login to XP Pro machine

I would pull the drive and put it in another machine as a second drive
to extract the data you want. That is the most cost effective method.

Gary



On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 07:59:50 GMT, BertS <> wrote:

>I have a customer's machine that will not allow me to login. I get the login
>prompt, click on the icon (two accounts, Administrator and one more that I
>don't know what privileges it has). When I click on the account icon it starts
>to login and then immediately logs out back to the login prompt.
>
>I need to access the machine to remove some data before I do a system restore.
>
>The drive is formatted to NTFS. I tried to do a recovery from the XP disk but
>it says the password for Administrator is no good. There should be no
>password on either that account or the other one.
>
>My guess with the little information I have is that the SAM is somehow damaged.
>
>A long time ago I used NTFS2DOS in a similar situation but I am not sure if
>there is something similar for XP. I used it to access an NT4 machine.
>
>Dell suggested that the drive be sent to a company that does recovery but the
>custmoer does not want to spend the money for that option.
>
>I could install the drive in a different machine running @in2K as the second
>drive and try to read it that way. I could also have the customer purchase a
>hard drive, install XP on that drive as the primary drive and try to read the
>old drive after that.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a newer version of NTFS4DOS?
>Somewhere in my vast junkyard I have ERD but finding it is a problem and I
>don't even know if it works with SP. My problem is finding the CD.
>
>The OS is XP Pro recently patched with SP2.

Gary

>The only machine I have available at this time is a Win2K machine. Will it work?
>
>I will give that a try anyway.
>
>Bert
>
>Gary wrote:
>
>> I would pull the drive and put it in another machine as a second drive
>> to extract the data you want. That is the most cost effective method.
>>
>> Gary
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 07:59:50 GMT, BertS <> wrote:
>>
>>

A W2K machine will read NTFS partitions so the answer is yes.

Gary

Gary

For this kind of thing, I love my

BYTECC 5.25" IEEE 1394 External Enclosure

available from newegg.com (no, I'm not a rep from either company). It's
an external case that takes a 3.5" or 5.25" IDE drive, and turns it
into a firewire device. Awesome for backup (especially with hard drive
prices being what they are today), awesome for eliminating viruses and
malware that can otherwise be difficult to kill manually on a booted
drive because they affect files that are "in use".
USB versions are also available.

Lloyd Hugh Allen

"Lloyd Hugh Allen" <> wrote in message
news: oups.com...
> For this kind of thing, I love my
>
> BYTECC 5.25" IEEE 1394 External Enclosure
>
> available from newegg.com (no, I'm not a rep from either company). It's
> an external case that takes a 3.5" or 5.25" IDE drive, and turns it
> into a firewire device. Awesome for backup (especially with hard drive
> prices being what they are today), awesome for eliminating viruses and
> malware that can otherwise be difficult to kill manually on a booted
> drive because they affect files that are "in use".
> USB versions are also available.
>
I have to agree with you about New Egg. They even let us return some RAM
that we ordered when WE ordered the wrong thing and credited it to us. Of
course we did order more expensive RAM but they were real cool about it.

AG

AG