Missing User Names on Welcome Screen

A friend asked me to have a look ate her laptop. She uses the Welcome Screen to log onto Windows XP Home. Ther used to be three user names displayed. However now when Windows boots up there are no user names. If you press Control+Alt+Del the username/password box has her user name. However no password was ever setup, but when trying to log on with a blank password it brings up an error. I have tried the administartor account (again no password was ever setup) and the guest, but with no success.

I have done a search on the web and it seems to suggest that the SAM file within C:\Windows\system32\config has become corrupted. Advice suggests replacing the file with the SAM file found in C:\Windows\repair. However, as I can't actually get logged into the machine this is not possible.

One site suggested downloading NTFS Reader (link from bootdisk.com). I downloaded the image and wrote it to CD and managed to boot from it. I can navigate to the directoried, but when I try to copy files, the only drive that is available is the A: (WHich in this case is the CD drive, which I obvioulsy can't write to).

I am beginning to think that the only way to get around this is to reinstall Windows. However, my firend has some data (mostly photographs) on the harddrive that she doesn't want to lose. If the machine had been a desktop, I would just have removed the hard drive and connected it as a slve to mine, and copied that data over first. However that isn't an option,.

Can somebody please help?

Thanks,
Paul

I would suggest you try a repair install. This shouldn't delete your friend's files.

Edited by JonRennie (Thu 13-Jul-06 07:42:28)

You can pick up an external usb caddy for 2.5"(laptop) hard drives for less than a tenner. A small price to pay if her pictures are important to her. Putting her hard drive in one of these would enable you to back up any accessible data.

Options include a repair install, as already suggested. It does need a genuine Windows CD afaik and not the "recovery partition" or "recovery media" supplied by some "name" companies (though sometimes they may offer an allegedly equivalent function). Also be aware that a repair may be somewhat destructive - it *shouldn't* lose user data, but it *may* lose enough current settings, applications, and so on to necessitate a full re-install from scratch once you've got the important data off. Personally I wouldn't trust a manufacturer-supplied repair process unless I'd already seen it work.

Another low cost option might be to find a bootable "Live Linux" CD with NTFS support (I think SuSE does) and use it to get the important data off to writable media, or maybe over the network to another box. Might also allow you to delete the troublesome SAM files.

Yet another option would be to get a copy of Ghost, boot the Ghost CD and use it to get an image of the *whole* system onto something else (via writable media, USB storage, or the network). Re-install the laptop, and use Ghost Explorer to selectively extract the relevant files (photos etc) from the saved disk image. Then your laptop user can use Ghost to take regular backups in readiness for the next time this happens .

The laptop is a Compaq. It did come with an XP CD. I tried booting with that in, then selecting repair. However it is prompting for the administartor password, which should be blank, but isn't.

I think you might be trying to do the repair install incorrectly. You should not be asked for any passwords during the process (I have had to do it before, so am familiar with how it works), which would suggest you are in fact trying to access the Recovery Console (albeit inadvertently).

Instructions on how to perform a proper Windows XP repair installation can be found here:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm#RI

OK, my mistake. I will try this when I get home tonight. Is this likely to allow me access to windows to get the data from the hardwrive (by wrting it to CD, or by setting up a share on the hard drive so that I can connect it to my home network and copy them to my PC)?

Thanks for the help,
Paul

when he says repair, we dont mean the recovery console. You want to go to the stage where it says it's detecting previous installs, and then hit the relevent button (R i think) and windows will do the rest.

"Is this likely to allow me access to windows to get the data from the hardwrive (by wrting it to CD, or by setting up a share on the hard drive so that I can connect it to my home network and copy them to my PC)? "

That's the theory. Depending on what got broken, you may have to poke around a bit to find the files of interest, I've seen Repair installs create a user a new directory in an obscurely named C:\Documents And Settings folder, but it's left the old files around in the old folder.

Look for the latest ultimate boot cd. It contains a program called Commander 2005 which allows full access to all your drives.