Password during Repair not working

[ChinaBull]

Background:

My old PC was running XP until the “Load needed DLLs for kernel” problem showed up. I have finally gotten a Slip Stream (of the original disk plus SPs) to run through selecting “Repair”. Then it asks which “Windows Installation” I want repaired. (There is only one OS installed. However, there is a directory of DOS 6.2 on the 2nd partition.) When I enter “1” I am immediately asked for the Admin’s Password. Every password I try is rejected, including the password I am reasonably sure is correct.

Question:

Since I can’t boot to XP is there a way to: find or replace the Password, find the “Password Hint”, or otherwise solve the DLL problem by installing the HD as a slave in another PC?

[allen2]

You could reset the password with offline ntpasswd or disable recovery console asking the administrator password.

To disable the recovery console from asking amin password, there 2 ways:

1st way:

Boot with a winpe launch regedit and load the system hive (c:\windows\system32\config\software) after selecting when prompted for a name type SOFT then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFT\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole and set the DWORD SecurityLevel value to 1 (if it doesn't exist, you'll need to create it).

Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFT and unload the hive. Reboot on the CD and laucnh the recovery console.

2nd way:

XP can boot in safe mode, so can do the regedit thing from there (but you'll need an administrator account).

The reg key will be HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole.