I am attending to two systems (1 x XP and 1 x Vista) that will not boot from the HDD. I suspect either a bad BOOT.INI file, bad Boot sector or corrupted Master Boot Record, damaged by a probable virus attack.
I can boot from the XP and the Vista installation CD's, and can get to the Recovery Console area, but then I hit a problem. The users cannot remember their administrator password, and the Recovery Console won't allow access to the Windows installation without this password. I am therefore unable to run the various recovery utilities (Bootcfg, Fixboot or Fixmbr) to correct the problem.
We don't want to re-install the O/S from scratch, as there is a lot of data and settings that would be lost. Is there a download (.ISO image?) which will create a bootable CD (either XP or Vista, hopefully one for each), containing these utilities, which I can then run and repair the damage? A password reset tool would be useful as well.
Many thanks.
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How do I create Windows XP and Vista bootable CD's to repair bad MBR
I can boot from the XP and the Vista installation CD's, and can get to the Recovery Console area, but then I hit a problem. The users cannot remember their administrator password, and the Recovery Console won't allow access to the Windows installation without this password. I am therefore unable to run the various recovery utilities (Bootcfg, Fixboot or Fixmbr) to correct the problem.
We don't want to re-install the O/S from scratch, as there is a lot of data and settings that would be lost. Is there a download (.ISO image?) which will create a bootable CD (either XP or Vista, hopefully one for each), containing these utilities, which I can then run and repair the damage? A password reset tool would be useful as well.
Many thanks.