Windows won’t restart

[Vieux Richard]

A friend requested his Windows XP Home Edition to return to last known good configuration.

Ever since, he can’t boot Windows and gets an error message even when trying to get in to SAFE mode with F8:

“When trying to update the password, the return status indicates that the value provided as the current password is not correct”

What should he do next?

[Cricket]

Not sure if this will work or not, but try booting the computer to the WinXP CD and choose to do a repair of the current Windows installation.

Cricket

[doctorgonzo]

When that happened to me, I had to reformat and reinstall. Nothing else would work.

There is a KB article from M$ that describes this, but when I had this problem it wasn't due to any of the reasons in the article. I honestly don't know what happened.

[swhite]

Are you sure he is running the home edition? If he were running the pro version, the password may have timed out. The default in the pro version is 42 days unless it is disabled.

He could try reinstalling Windows in the hopes it will retrieve his old settings but it sounds like this install will be difficult to fix. He may end up reformatting. He can probably save some of his files using dos or attaching the drve as a slave to another computer running windows and copy to another harddrive.

[Vieux Richard]

Thank you for the replies - have passed the info on to the friend.

I have not yet started using Windows XP, as I am v. happy with Windows 2000 but it looks like I will have to start supporting it as many of my customers are buying new kit with the damn thing already installed.