I have a Non-Profit groups machine (I actually belong to the club), an HP Pavilion 552x running Win XP Home, it has a boot file that is corrupt (as soon as I get it hooked back up I will add the exact startup error message to the post…something “init”).
I can reach the Recovery Console (an I need to affect a repair to XP so I can recover about a month(s) worth of work product which equals a ton of hrs. since I was last in and burned a back up CD of all the important data files and membership program info…figures it’s dues time of the year). But they originally entered an Administrator Password when they first set it up and cannot find the password. The guy that set it up for them was a member who passed away within the last year. I tried about 100 combinations today of anything they could think of 3 @ a time and booting by my XP Home CD to allow me to try more combinations.
I’m going to do a full reformat and restore from the D:\ Drive after I recover the necessary data, as I know the HP Restore set program disks are copied there (It launched once already today when trying to reach Safe Mode and I cancelled it before it Fdisked C:\).
Is there any way around the password that anyone knows of to affect the XP repair? I read somewhere quite a while ago that booting to a Win98SE or Win2K disk will allow the Admin. password to be seen/discovered using the Recovery Console in XP, but I can not for the life of me remember where that info was…Might have been Langa’s newsletter a year or more ago.
If someone can figure a way and send me step-by-step, or point me in the right direction, I’ll make it worth their while points wise well beyond that listed here and surely be highly appreciative.
Thank’s all.