Welcome screen with no accounts

[Soapy Bones]

I just this morning turned on my desktop to find that it boots to the windows welcome screen, which it has not normally done in the past. However, there are absolutely NO users there to sign in with! I havent added/removed any programs or done anything different at all with the system so its quite confusing as to why its showing this. How do I get around it???

I'm running Windows XP Home on the system.

** edit**

I tried booting in safe mode and I didnt get anywhere, says the same thing and does not show any "administrator"

Still completely locked out of the system, what now?

 

[Kelemvor]

Is there anything to click that you can at least get into the desktop or are you stuck and can't even log in at all?

 

[Soapy Bones]

All it says is something to the affect of select your windows user to log on or whatever on the left, completely blank on the right hand side, and i can shutdown at the bottom left.
That's all that is there, I do not ever use windows logon and dont have a password protecting my logon on this computer.

 

[Rapidskies]

Try going into safe mode at boot by hitting the F8 key. It will use the administrator account for that. Once in safe mode add another administrator account and/or change the way users logon (require control-alt-delete). Then try rebooting in normal mode and see if you can get in.

 

[Soapy Bones]

I will try that when I get back.

Any clues as to how/why this happened???

 

[Soapy Bones]

I tried booting in safe mode and I didnt get anywhere, says the same thing and does not show any "administrator"

Still completely locked out of the system, what now?

 

[kuritadelta]

Do I smell foul play?

If you have another computer, or goto someone else's.. download Windows password reset programs(linux based) and burn it to CD then run it and change the sam files.

Or if you have another spare HDD, intall a quick OS(internet off/no update etc) on it as primary and attach your current as secondary and check it.

 

[Soapy Bones]

I am currently on my laptop directly next to that desktop with the problems. I pushed Ctl Alt Del at the login screen and it showed my name, but no password works that I have ever used.

I had Emergency Boot CD Rom (www.ebcd.pcministry.com) and I cannot get it to work. I had only used it on a win2000 professional install (successfully) but I cannot figure the thing out here.

If I can blank the PW I can get in and see what went wrong, when I booted the system the first time this morning it ran scandisk and fixed a bunch of errors but I got nowhere.

No idea why there were any errors either...

 

[Rapidskies]

Sorry to see your system is still giving you fits. Your administrator password would be whatever it was at the time the OS was installed (unless you changed it since then). If you still can't log on here is a boot floppy that you can reset the admin password with:

Offline NTFS Boot floppy

Hopefully that will help get you logged in, take care!

 

[Soapy Bones]

THanks for the help thus far, I have gotten the program running, and follow the FAQ to get there. However here is the problem. It gets to the point of chntpw edit user info & passwords and it says it cannot find usernames in registry! (is this a SAM-hive?)

Now what !!!
it says nothing exists

 

[Soapy Bones]

Just looked to restore the registry from the system restore...

it asks for the administrator password, and nothing works, including.. just pushing enter.

Now that's interesting, it says that there isnt anything in the SAM file, but now apparently there is...
i hate computers

 

[thegorx]

get a bartspe disk, open System Volume Information folder on the root drive browse to a recent registry snapshot and copy it to
WINDOWS\system32\config

rename hive files accordingly

you might also want to backup current hives just for good measure or if you want to load them later to have a look

 

[Soapy Bones]

Never heard of a bartspe disk but i doubt it'd work, I cannot start in safe mode, i cannot even use the recovery console because the password doesnt exist...

 

[thegorx]

a bartspe disk boots from the CD drive and doesn't need to hard drive to boot

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/index.php?p=1

but once booted you can then access the hard drive and your registry snapshots
it should work fine unless you have a hardware problem

 

[Soapy Bones]

I burned the bootable CD with that program on it, and I am loading it right now.

What will I be able to accomplish by viewing my registry snapshots? Is there someway to modify it this way?

 

[thegorx]

well using regedit from run you can load hive and edit them
but what I'm saying is the snapshot folder has the system software and sam hive files they just have longer names that will need to be renamed if you want to replace the non functioning ones in the windows\system32\config folder

but it sounds like a hive problem so replacing the main hive files to a time you know worked should get you to where you can login

 

[beyonddc]

Is there a solution to this problem?

This is exactly what's going on on my friend's computer.

I don't know what he did, but I've no access into the computer at all.

Welcome screen has no username displayed to login and I cannot login as admin either.