I have a DELL 8300 desktop machine with WinXP Home edition installed. It is networked with several other computers on my NETGEAR router & everything has been running fine. When booting ut up, it would go straight to the desktop. However, after rebooting it today, it is all of a sudden now giving me the logon screen with my username & asking for a password. I can't seem to get in cause I don't remember ever setting up a password. I can see the shared drives on it from the other PCs, but I just can't get into the 8300s desktop itself. Has it somehow got infected with a virus or worm of some sort? If so, is there anyway of fixing it offline or finding out what this password is?
It could, just take it in to best buy thats what I did before. Now I just wipe the drive, do you have a boot disc or something.
Well, if worse comes to worse, you can pull this main drive out, connect it to another PC via a USB/IDE kit of some sort, get the important info off of it (documents, music, appz, etc.) & then strip and reload WinXP. Hopefully there is another solution though before you have to do all that.
check the time & date is correct as the cmos battery on a customer's computer died & set the time back to 2001, before xp was around
LophtCrack produce a password resetting utility. http://www.evadenet.com/downloads/lophtcrack.shtml Have you come accross the share$ feature in Windows. You mention you can see the shared drives, well all drives are shared you just can't always get to them. If you want to get to the drive over the network type: \\ComputerName\C$ return in the address bar of explorer.
