Alright, I'm at the end of my wits so I figured I'd ask here.
My girlfriend runs Windows XP Pro on her computer. She always had it set to log her username on without prompting for a password (according to her she never set a password, but left it blank instead). Now last week all of a sudden it prompts for a password, and nothing she enters works; she keeps getting the error message that the password is incorrect.
I used to be able to access her shared files and her printer from my computer through our local network, but that doesn't work anymore either; it asks me for a username and password. It never did that before.
So my guess was it was some kind of virus/trojan that had changed the password(s), locking her out of her pc. I have this old Knoppix disc lying around so I thought if I can boot that and somehow reset or change the windows password from there then I can fix it. I followed this guide, but the chnptw utility can't read the sam file properly, and thus can't change the password. This lead me to believe that the sam file is possibly corrupted. Although if that was the case windows would return an error upon booting, saying that the sam file is missing or corrupt, rather than waiting for you to enter a password and then saying it's incorrect. At least that's what my common sense tells me, I'm not really an IT guru.
I tried replacing the sam file in system32/config with the one from windows/repair, but doing that resulted in windows throwing an error upon booting, like what I described in the previous paragraph. So now it won't even let you type in a password.
I then tried to replace the sam file with one from the "restore points" windows xp creates. Those files are stored in a folder called "System Volume Information" (or something along those lines). The weird thing is that the earliest restore point that is stored on the drive seems to be from the exact time the computer first had that problem. So that doesn't fix it either.
Right now I think my best bet is to just format the drive and reinstall windows. Obviously, though, she doesn't want to lose all the pictures on her drive - some 7 GB worth of 'em. So I'll have to burn those on CD's (doesn't have a DVD burner), and then format and reinstall.
I just thought I'd come here and see if there's someone here who has an idea that I haven't tried yet.
Thanks in advance for your time.
My girlfriend runs Windows XP Pro on her computer. She always had it set to log her username on without prompting for a password (according to her she never set a password, but left it blank instead). Now last week all of a sudden it prompts for a password, and nothing she enters works; she keeps getting the error message that the password is incorrect.
I used to be able to access her shared files and her printer from my computer through our local network, but that doesn't work anymore either; it asks me for a username and password. It never did that before.
So my guess was it was some kind of virus/trojan that had changed the password(s), locking her out of her pc. I have this old Knoppix disc lying around so I thought if I can boot that and somehow reset or change the windows password from there then I can fix it. I followed this guide, but the chnptw utility can't read the sam file properly, and thus can't change the password. This lead me to believe that the sam file is possibly corrupted. Although if that was the case windows would return an error upon booting, saying that the sam file is missing or corrupt, rather than waiting for you to enter a password and then saying it's incorrect. At least that's what my common sense tells me, I'm not really an IT guru.
I tried replacing the sam file in system32/config with the one from windows/repair, but doing that resulted in windows throwing an error upon booting, like what I described in the previous paragraph. So now it won't even let you type in a password.
I then tried to replace the sam file with one from the "restore points" windows xp creates. Those files are stored in a folder called "System Volume Information" (or something along those lines). The weird thing is that the earliest restore point that is stored on the drive seems to be from the exact time the computer first had that problem. So that doesn't fix it either.
Right now I think my best bet is to just format the drive and reinstall windows. Obviously, though, she doesn't want to lose all the pictures on her drive - some 7 GB worth of 'em. So I'll have to burn those on CD's (doesn't have a DVD burner), and then format and reinstall.
I just thought I'd come here and see if there's someone here who has an idea that I haven't tried yet.
Thanks in advance for your time.
I don't know a whole lot about virusses (virii?) and what they can and cannot do, but I'm pretty protective when it comes to my computer 