My roommate hacked into my computer one time when he was upset with me and I was tinkering around with some settings in order to make my computer more secure. As stupid as it may sound I disabled the floppy drive in the device manager and then I stumbled across this “syskey” trick and since my bedroom door doesn’t have a lock on it I thought “WOW! What a great idea to keep my computer secure when I’m away! I’ll give it a shot!” The gist of things is now I’m typing from a computer at my university because I forgot to re-enable my floppy drive and my startup key disk isn’t working. I’m locked out! The floppy disk seems to be recognized by my BIOS giving me the message about a non system disk and telling me to take is out and press any key to continue. When the syskey “Windows XP Startup Key Disk” window appears though the disk doesn’t seem to be recognized. The ready light doesn’t come on and I don’t even hear it reading the disk before a message pops up that says “The startup key file was not found on the disk in drive A:. Please insert the correct disk.” I’m quite certain the file is there and I’m not using a bad disk (I checked it on the university computer). How can I get past syskey to reenable the floppy drive? I downloaded “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor”. Is there a way to change a registry setting to enable the disk drive from that (or any other) program without having to modify any syskey settings or cause any major damage? BTW I’m using EFS to encrypt a lot of my files. I have my EFS certs/private key backed up and like I said I even have my startup key disk for syskey. I think I just need to re-enable the drive somehow?
Honestly, this is Microsoft software we’re talking about! There’s gotta be a way around this…
UPDATE: Well I managed to bypass syskey but now my passwords aren’t working. Should I be happy? Sad? I honestly don’t know. I’m hoping there is a way to get the passwords, login, re-enable the floppy drive and then put everything back to the way it was including re-enabling syskey. Maybe I have high hopes? Especially for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing! This is giving me a headache (literally)!
