User brought in system with following issue:

System will boot in normal mode to the Windows Welcome Screen.
No user accounts listed on the right side.
If system is booted to safe mode, same issue
Booted system to linux password reset util
linux reports that there are no user accounts on the system

We then performed a repair install of Windows XP Pro
During the install, windows asked for a user account name to create
We gave it a unique name
The repair install completed successfully
After the repair install completed, the same issue remained

Please advise.

--
Ed Hodges
EMMTEK, Inc.
ed <at> emmtek <dot> com

Sounds like corruption of the sam file. What you could try is to copy the
sam file from the \windows\repair folder to the \windows \system32\config
folder after renaming the sam file there. That would have to be done outside
of the operating system by installing the hard drive into another computer
or booting to something like Bart's PE. However the computer will most
likely be left with only the default users [administrator/guest] and groups.
If the user has a backup of the System State you could do a new install and
restore the System State that would restore all users/groups that existed at
the time the System State backup was done. If the user or any user on the
computer had any files encrypted via EFS they may not be able to access them
without the help of a not free program like the one from Elcomsoft or maybe
not at all [never make a guarantee of such] if there was no System State
backup or the user had not exported his EFS private key to password
protected .pfx file. --- Steve


"Ed Hodges" <firstname@organizationname.com> wrote in message
news:e7XJeBHGGHA.1452@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> User brought in system with following issue:
>
> System will boot in normal mode to the Windows Welcome Screen.
> No user accounts listed on the right side.
> If system is booted to safe mode, same issue
> Booted system to linux password reset util
> linux reports that there are no user accounts on the system
>
> We then performed a repair install of Windows XP Pro
> During the install, windows asked for a user account name to create
> We gave it a unique name
> The repair install completed successfully
> After the repair install completed, the same issue remained
>
> Please advise.
>
> --
> Ed Hodges
> EMMTEK, Inc.
> ed <at> emmtek <dot> com
>

Thanks for the response. I rather doubt the user has enabled EFS and we are
right now burning a ghost of the drive. Once the ghost is complete, we'll
perform the copy and put the drive back in the orig machine and give it a
try.

Ed