My moms dell/win XP computer is not allowing her to log itno windows.

[coolred]

She just called me and said she was playing bingo or somethign online and all of a sudden everythign froze and she had to reboot. After the reboot the log on screen pops up(she has it setup to automatically log her in, though)when she clicks her username she said it does nothing. I got her to reboot and try to get into safe mode and she says it does the same thing. Any ideas? Any way to do a system restore from a safe mode command propmt?

 

[coolred]

Dell is telling her its a new worm, any info on this?

 

[johnjkr1]

Dell says alot of things, especially to home users. I used to work there, I know. It could be a worm, certainly. Did she have all the updates installed? If not, it is probably a worm. She can try a repair, or a repair install. If that fails she will likely have to format.

Does she get any kind of error message when she tries to select her profile?

 

[coolred]

Well she should have the updates through at the very least last weekend, as I did an update for her then. Her norton antivirus downloads new definitions every day and she does have the MS firewall on.

No error message when she selects her profile.

One other thing I should add, probablly not related, but who knows. A while ago when I came up for a visit, she asked abotu something new on her system. Basically when the system went into power saving mode and then you wiggled the mouse to wake it up, and screen came up, basically like the log in screen, and she would have to click her profile to get into windows. Int he bottom right hand corner it said something like shut off my new toy.

I am not sure what this is exaclty nor how it got on there. She claims not to have installed it. I didn't unless it was possibly part of a windows update.

 

[Psych]

If it says "Shut off MY NEW TOY" then something is definitely going on. I think it is some malware designed to steal your password.

Boot off the CD and try to do some repairs from the recovery console if you can.

 

[coolred]

Ahh, still nto sure what it is, but the problem was a stupid one. After spending several hours on the phone with foreign tech support she called me saying she was just gonna send the dang thing back to them, cause she was so pissed at how crappy thier tech support was. Well for some dumb reason I got an idea, and told her to try a differant mouse, and low and behold that worked. Must be a messed up mouse.

 

[johnjkr1]

Umm, wow. Simple. Of course, I doubt they would take it back. I never did when I worked there.

As for the tech support, yes, it is horrible. The outsourced call centers just read off a script, but, of course, a problem like hers does not fit in the script so they have no idea what they are doing. I'm surprised they didn't just tell her to format right off the bat.

 

[coolred]

Yeah i know they wouldn't take it back, but thats how she gets when she has computer problems. i also told her about how the tech support reads off a script and like you said, wouldn't be abel to catch something odd like this.


She said the first lady she talked to was a real bit#h and didn't help at all. The second lady she said was a lot more helpful and nice, but after an hour or so of work, when the lady couldn't figure it out, she convieniently got disconnected.

One other question. One of the people told her to unplug her keyboard and I think her mouse and told her to reboot. I was under the impression you would get an errorwith no keyboard installed, has this changed recently?

 

[nsafreak]

Depends on how the BIOS is set. You can set it to continue on boot without a keyboard on some Dells I believe.

 

[McMadman]

Originally posted by: coolred
She just called me and said she was playing bingo or somethign online and all of a sudden everythign froze and she had to reboot. After the reboot the log on screen pops up(she has it setup to automatically log her in, though)when she clicks her username she said it does nothing. I got her to reboot and try to get into safe mode and she says it does the same thing. Any ideas? Any way to do a system restore from a safe mode command propmt?

If when she selects her profile it freezes acting like it's logging in (it may say logging on, but sit there forever), there's a chance that her registry/sam file may be corrupted.

If she tried to boot off a standard windows cd, and enter the recovery console with an administrator password it will probably fail.

If that is the problem, system recovery is a great help because it makes daily backups of the registry, but she may need to use something like ntfsdospro or something else that can write to a ntfs drive (putting the drive in another xp machine would work too)

The backed up registry files will be in a directory along the lines of
c:\system volume information\_restore~1\RP#\snapshot
there should be a large amount of backed up registries.

This link is a little easier to follow than microsofts instructions on it. You may need to improvize, but it works as a basic guideline.

This is microsoft's version of the same method of recovery.

Hopefully this is her problem, and you can recover it - I have used ntfsdospro to recover a few systems in the past, but it did not work correctly with a SATA controller, and of course that program is far from freeware.

A BartPE cd may help too, but I have never used this tool myself.