No logon in Win XP Home

[BouncingSoul]

Here's the deal, I get this call from a lady who is constantly messing her system up. She thinks norton did this to her but I can't believe that's the case. Anyways, you boot the system and when the "click on which account you want to log onto screen" (whatever that is called) comes up ... there's nothing there. Just an empty space where the accounts should be. You can ctrl alt del to an old fashioned type your username & password screen but she doesn't know either the u/n or p/w. I'm guessing she somehow deleted all of her user accounts and is just S.O.L but I figured I'd ask. So is there anything she can do? Any utility that will allow me to create a new account for her or something? Thanks in advance.

 

[kcnychief]

Try Administrator and Blank at the CTRL + ALT + DEL

Else use tools to recover the admin password and take a peek at what's going on...

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm

 

[omg its nlm]

You have her try loging in with Administrator and no password to see if that works?

Dang you kcnychief!

 

[American Zombie]

You can only logon as administrator of XP Home through safe mode.

Try logging into safe mode command prompt as administrator then issue the net users command to see the list of users. If the accounts are still there then you can erase or change the password with the net user command.

net user John - That would blank the password

net user John xxxx - That would change John's password to xxxx

 

[BouncingSoul]

Thanks all, I'll try it next time I'm over there.

 

[BouncingSoul]

Just now got around to working on this. I used a linux based password reset tool. It went through the registry and returned a list of users. The good news: it gave me the option to reset the passwords. The bad news: It only found one account ASPNET. I've seen this before on XP machines, I think its setup by default and I don't think you can actually login as ASPNET, at least it wouldn't let me. At any rate I didn't see the bit about being in safe mode before you can login as Administrator. I'll try it but will it work since that account didn't show up as even existing? Thanks again.