Very Desperate - 30 dollars Paypal to Whoever Can Save My Installation

[pseizure2000]

The whole situation can be read about at this thread:
http://www.pcabusers.com/forum...?s=&threadid=37316

I'm starting to get very desperate so hopefully a 30 dollar incentive will encourage people to put forth helpful info. Not only are there irreplacable things I can only access by booting but Half Life 2 enitirely preloaded coming out next week...so im kinda in a rush...along with other reasons. heh

 

[DennyD]

There's a lot of info there... can you condense it for me? Let's see if MS did screw ya; I work for 'em and let's see if we can fix what's happening.

What was the original BSOD? Also, instead of going to the Recovery Console where it is asking for a password, press the ENTER TO INSTALL feature and then after the license agreement you will have the message "if one of the following xp installs is damaged, setup can try to repair it" Press R for repair.

You could press ESC to install a new copy; just choose a new partition then install to it.

 

[pseizure2000]

Don't know what the original BSOD is but, we've already tried repair installs, and they don't work as it says in that thread. We believe elements of the failed SP2 install may have caused it to reboot constantly at the logo boot screen. We have been able to use ERD Commander to run a system recovery. This normally would solve the problem however it is compounded with a microsoft activation problem....the activation period has run out, and the msoobe program that allows me to activate windows refuses to run. So in short it won't allow me to even log in unless I activate it, which you may now see the conundrum

 

[DetroitSportsFan]

Read this HERE, It gives some information, a link, and recommends some software for regaining access to your adminstrator account.

However, I don't understand why you can't merely browse your damaged OS drive and save your files and settings on your current good partition. Since I don't know what all you want to save, I'm unable to direct you yet. As mentioned above .... more information The more the better, and preferably in this thread.


EDIT: If I happen to be the one that helps you the most when this is all said and done, donate that $30 to toys for tots. Let someone less fortunate than I provide some kind of Christmas for his children.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Try this to set password to nothing

does not work well to change it

 

[pseizure2000]

Do you really believe accessing the Recovery Console will be of any value? I have already tried a repair install.

-I am really trying to recover the installation and no other data in particular.

 

[DetroitSportsFan]

Last post and off to bed for me ....

Sometimes recovery console doesn't fix the problems. I've had successes and "not so successes" with the recovery console. In your case, you may want to consider a complete format and reinstall .... I know, so much time to reset up everything. In the future, if you ghost your new installation .... its a pretty quick operation.

 

[Gioron]

Depending on your setup, you might be able to boot from a Knoppix CD, then copy the files you want to save to a blank partition, then wipe and reinstall on the first partition and copy the files back. This can cause registry problems, but might work for things like preloaded HL2 if you can find where steam stores it.

Of course, this assumes you have access to something that can burn an Knoppix CD and space enough to copy files over or some other place to store the files temporarily.

 

[gutharius]

Have you tried changing the security settings on the other partition, while booted to the functional partition, so you are the owner and administrator for all files and folders on that dead xp partition? You can do this by right clicking your documents and settings folder then clicking on security or sharing i think. From there you can specify privliges and settings so you can access all files and make changes.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Have you tried resetting the ADMIN Password with a utility
such as NTPASSRESET?

 

[dman]

Have you booted into the recovery console and gotten past the password issue there? If so you can run a SPuninstall command manually (look it up on MS Site). After that run repair install again. That worked for me on one machine I had problems with. I've since made an XP SP2 Slipstreamed CD and things are much happier for me.