XP pro repair with no admin password?

[mikeford]

I've forgotten most of what I used to know about messing with XP, and trying to revive my wife's old PC with some boot issues I put in the XP install CD and booted with it, selected repair, and selected the XP pro install on her hard drive, but I never set a admin password on it and couldn't figure out how to make it accept no password and repair it. What did I forget?

 

[RebateMonger]

Are you sure you are in the right place on the XP boot menus? If you want to do an XP "Repair Install", you do NOT select the first "Repair" (R) option offered. That will only lead you to the Recovery Console, which isn't useful to most folks. Tell the XP Installer you want to "Setup" XP, let it show you the old XP installation, and tell it you want to do a "Repair Install" (the second "R" that's offered). A Repair Install is started without a password.

Perform a Repair Installation:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx

If you DO want tthe Recovery Console and you've already set a password for the Administrator account, you can run one of the Linux-based password-blanking CDs to remove the password.

 

[mikeford]

Ended up doing the second type of repair you mention, but sloppy record keeping I think at the cost of wasting a fully legal XP pro CD key, since I couldn't remember which package I originally installed with. Now I need to audit the more than half a dozen PC's and laptops around the house, extract the key's used, find all the old paperwork and match them up.

My trouble was "no admin password was ever set". This had to be an "open" system, but when I got to the point where the installer cd wanted a password, I couldn't find any way to proceed. Blank would go to the dos prompt, and there was no password.

BTW I have gotten smarter since then and downloaded MSDarT and a bunch of other tools.