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WinXP Home can't login

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by don christner

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I've fdisked and formatted a drive to NTFS, booted off of a Windows XP Home CD, did a complete reinstall, typed in 'owner' for a username with no password. When I try to log in, it says incorrect password. When I boot to safe mode and try to log in as 'administrator' with a blank password (I never set one on this fresh install), it still says incorrect password.

What the heck?!?! After doing a fresh intall; why can't I log onto this machine?

TIA,
Don

2 replies

by hal 9000

You unknowingly typed in a Password or what's more likely if all you did was erase and format the HDD you have kept some of what was on the previous install and that is now active in the new install.

What the correct thing to do is to wipe the HDD with a utility that writes Zero's to every sector and then do a clean install of XP and allow the install process to do the format. Even then when using the Normal Format the HDD is only written to once in every 3 sectors so you have 2 sectors that remain untouched no mater how many times you format the drive as it will always be the same sectors that are written to.

For a wiping Utility there is always Boot & Nuke which works quite well and is available from here

http://tinyurl.com/4rfur

If you have reloaded for some reason that was caused by a bad Windows Install or an infection I would suggest that you download the above utility wipe the drive and reload the system.

Col

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