I just had a machine come into my shop with a most interesting problem. All of the user accounts are gone, it will boot up into the windows XP (home) logon screen and have no choices. Even under safe mode the Admin option is not available, i tried "Ctrl + Del" to go into the manual option, and manually type any of the customers screen names, and this also dosent work. Im trying to solve this issue with out doing a system restore.
thanks
I just had a machine come into my shop with a most interesting problem. All of the user accounts are gone, it will boot up into the windows XP (home) logon screen and have no choices. Even under safe mode the Admin option is not available, i tried "Ctrl + Del" to go into the manual option, and manually type any of the customers screen names, and this also dosent work. Im trying to solve this issue with out doing a system restore.
thanks
I frig with xp a bit ,just wondering you say you don't want to do a system restore ,why not !or do you mean a OS reload ,also if you have no admin acct in safe mode what do you get !
What about booting to the Winxp cd and doing a SFC \SCANNOW
this is a customers machine and there not willing to add the extra money for aback up and there not authorizing a restore. i cannot run the command you suggested because i need a admin account to log into recovery consol.
basicly what i get is the system will boot up normal, then you get the standard blue logon screen that asks you to choose a user. there is no user. i have a list of the customers user account names and passwords and i use the "Ctrl Alt DEl" to manually enter account info and this dosent work either.
try out last known good configuration ... or your can repair the win xp installation. I think someone has deleted all the user profiles.
last good config only works with the last sucessfull boot, which in this case is with out any user names. anyone with ideas on how i could create a user profile from a command prompt? because i could try to create a boot disk with any command files i need. its an hp laptop so i dont have access to somethings i would have on a regular xp disk, like doing an over install.
have they given you the admin password? when you cad do you get a loggin prompt? if not then you will need to reinstall... did you ask how they broke it? it sounds to me like they went into system controlls and deleted every user account?? also, if you can boot into command promt try using net start to start the windows login service as they may have disabled this?
Harry
Find a copy of Bart's PE disc with the registry editor and boot using that. It will allow you to view the registry and modify any keys you need to (in the event anything was changed.)
Check HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ and make sure Userinit is set to C:\Windows\System32\userinit.exe
I've seen when Spyware changes that, and sometimes a backup of the original (if it's been changed) is made to {same path}\BackupUserinit.
If all else fails, and the other suggestions above fail, they're not going to have too much choice about doing a fresh install. Maybe they should learn not to mess with stuff they aren't familiar with...
i finally got the customer to accept a restore, so i guess ill never have the full answer, they say that it just happened i did remove 15 viruses and alot of spyware from the machine so who knows.
back to the admin password, there response when i asked for that on day one was "whats that" so there never was a password on that even the recovery consul when i attempted to use that would ask you to select a volume then not log in so im in the beilief of them all being gone.
you cant manually delete the user accounts the xp protection will kick in and even in the case of deleting the normal accounts theres no getting rid of the admin account. though im gonna check out that barts pe it looks interesting, ive been useing PHLAK with a similar purpose but its a bit flacky, and it dosent always corectly access the non linux partitions.
anyways thanks for all your ideas
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