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Having a password issue from hell

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I work in a clinic at UNC and am having a problem with one of our older tablets. We have a tablet that crashed and when started up it would tell me that the windows\system32\copnfig\system was corrupt. This would normally be a simple fix, but the tablets dont have any removable media drives. This would also be easy to fix if our network was dhcp, then i could use the pxe card and just reimage it. What i tried doing to it was inserting the hard drive into a desktop computer and booting off the Windows Cd. I then went into recovery console, and tried a fix proposed by a few sites to rename my old config folder to configold, then copied a new system file to the new config folder , from the windows\repair folder. After I did this i restarted the PC and tried booting to windows. This time the computer booted to the Windows logo then the logo disappears and the computer stays with a black screen. I once again rebooted and tried to go to the recovery console. This time when I got in it asked me for the admin password, this is where I am having troubles. I will give you a little bit more background on the PC. These pc’s were originally not ours, they were supported by the Main UNC hospital. After they had aged, the hospital gave us new tablets, but they are going to let us keep the first generation tablets, under the condition they are no longer responsible. On each pc it has three user accounts, one is an admin account we created to manage them, the other account is the built in admin account that they have renamed and password protected with a password we dont know. I geuss my question, and this will sound very sketchy, Is there a way I can get around this. Is there a way I can reset the password or will I need to reformat/get the password. I have alsow tried doing one other thing, I have plugged the HD into a desktop as the secondary drive and tried replacing the system file with a backup system file. Every time i think i am close to a solution this hard drive picks another one, any help would be appreciated.

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Many smaller notebooks

In reply to Having a password issue from hell

have what is referred to as a multibay. A udb device which chas interchangeable parts such as floppy, HDD, cd/dvd drive, etc.
I would suspect the same for your tablet if nothing is built in.

Also, there may even be a built in SD cardreader or a combo cardreader.

How far have you gone?

In reply to Having a password issue from hell

You didn’t say what the OS was. There’s lots of ways of getting the passwords sorted, but if you’ve trashed the file system – it could be just a little more difficult. I would suggest – assuming a 2.5″ HD and XP or W2K, put the HD in a laptop, or a desktop with adaptor as primary or only drive, then run a Windows install, say no to repair. It will now detect any existing OS and ask if you want to repair it. Yes, but you’ll need the CD keys etc. This won’t necessarily get around the password thing. That can be solved with any number of utils like Acronis, password reset etc. When ready to put the HD back, check that the necessary drivers are available. Otherwise look at a utility by Qui Hong in conjunction with WXPE (by Bart et al) to inject drivers (used for injecting VMscsi drivers into VMs when they fail P2V) Otherwise consider going through the sysprep route. Any Q’s let me know and I’ll try and help. Bear in mind Bart has some great utilities to fix things like this. 🙂

Knobhead

If you have more than one…

In reply to Having a password issue from hell

use a utility such as Acronis to image a working tablet onto a USB drive and then restore that image onto the problem tablet. This seems to be the simplest way.

You could also get a USB CDROM and boot from it.

Contact the main hospital

In reply to Having a password issue from hell

Even though they won’t support it, they may be willing to tell you the Admin password. It’s probably the same on all of your older tablets, so you’re going to want it eventually anyway. If they won’t tell you outright (because they probably use the same password on all their systems), ask them if you can bring it to them and have them change it for you.

While your at it, ask if they have the recovery or restore CDs / DVDs.

If you get really desperate, a local computer shop should be able to make an image of one of your working systems and transfer it to the defective one.

When connected to other PC

In reply to Having a password issue from hell

Basically you can try getting the registry backups from the restore folder’s most current snapshot. There are sevral ways off accomplishing that.
1. Use an external CD-ROM and XP CD or Ultimate Boot CD
2. Connect as a secondary drive on the PC you added it to when you got into the recovery console the first time.
3. Conect via USB external HD adapter to a working PC.

However you are able to do it, here is a link on how to do it from the MS KB. I would just copy the 5 orginal files to a temp directory, then replace them from the system restore point. The MS KB article gives steps on doing this from the recovery console but it can be done with explorer and the other methods I mentioned.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/

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