[urgent] Access Completely Disabled!

[Guest Obscurus]

Hello,

I don't have much time for an introduction (well, it's my first post here, right?), because I have a BIG trouble...

Access to the operating system (Windows XP, FAT32, Primary) on my mother's laptop is completely disabled. How did that happen? Well, the thing is that there was some problems installing software, because somewhy the administrator access wasn't global, so when I was at school my mother was phoning friends to help her and someone told her to check some boxes in Windows XP users section (where you can see who are administrators, add passwords, check access, etc.), which as I guess now was a complete access disable to selected users (all users (including administrator) were checked).

So now it's impossible to access the system with any of users (including administrator), system says "Access is Disabled". There are a lot of VERY important information! We must access it to at least copy it to an USB.

I have few ideas, like trying to install one more operating system and gaining access with the new one to the main (the one which is currently blocked), but I'm not sure about that... I could partition the HDD with fdisk, but will it be possible to access the main block (where WinXP is installed) from another partition (think about Primary/Logical/etc)... What do you think? Maybe there is a simplier way?

And by the way, on this computer I'm using Windows 98SE, so it won't be possible to check something inside, if needed...

Please, help us to solve this problem...

Thank You...

[^_^]

if you can build a bartPE cd, it would help you get in to back stuff up

see http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

[firefoxthebomb]

what I would do in your case, is use Norton ghost corp edition to make a ghost image of the computer, once I have that image on another computer (say laptop.gho) I would just format the laptop and start over with that. Then using ghost explorer I would copy the information in question back to the laptop off the ghost image.

[DigeratiPrime]

this might not work but did you try Safe Mode?

I dont think Windows lets you change the account type for the Administrator account, you try typing ctrl alt delete 2 times at the logon screen and then logging in as Administrator?

You could also access your drive contents with a Linux Live CD like Knoppix, that runs completely off the cd, it nevers touches your hard drive. With that you could read and backup your data.

In the future keep your Data on a seperate partition from the Windows Partition. Having everything on the "c" drive is crazy.

[red_house]

Use safe mode, as DigeratiPrime suggested. The "Administrator" account is, to the best of my knowledge, always active in safe mode. You can then change the other accounts back to their previous states from there.

[rendrag]

if you can figure out what was done you can try to fix it, however I might not hold out hope. I'd back up your data, reformat/install windows and call it a learning lesson

[Marsden]

Why bother to backup possible corrupted data? He is running FAT32 which has no provisions to protect data from corruption.

Use a Bart PE CD or a Knoppix CD and see if you can access the hard drive from there. If you can access the data save what you can through file transfer.

This is just another blaring reason not to use FAT32...