Today has not been a good day. What should have been a straight forward thing to do (install a 2nd HDD, swap my DVD drive out for a new one and put old one in rents computer, install win 7, sort network printer out) has been far from it.

The death-toll so far

First off I was a total numpty when sorting out the HDDs, forgetting to plug the power cables in (just the sata cables) and so I spent 10 minutes totally panicking when the bios failed to detect either of the drives :|

This should have been a sign to leave it till tomorrow when I wasnt rushing anf felt a little more clear headed.

Next up the Win 7 install crashed at 59% on the extracting windows files stage. So I restarted, deleted what I assume/presumed to be the small install partition it had created on the 2nd hard drive, and retried. This time it was successful.

Upon booting up into windows 7 I then turned the printer on and installed that.

"Mission accomplished" I thought to myself. Now all I have to do is change the boot manager to leave xp as default and then carry on with my work.

Click...click..click..."Uh, wheres XP?"

Yup, thats right, when the Win 7 install went sour the first time, and I restored the hard drive, somewhere along the lines I corrupted the boot record stuff and XP has ceased to be listed.

"Not to worry" I thought to myself, Ill just repair xp and then repair Win7 and thatll sort it, like I did a few years ago.

"Enter administrator password"...."incorrect password..."

Yeah, so I then got hit by the bug where even when you enter in the correct admin password, the recovery console doesnt accept it, effectively meaning unless I want to phone MS and get them to send me the hotfix, the XP install is boned on the system.

I couldnt be assed, by this time Im 2 hours behind work it seems, so whatever.

I then realise I hadnt tested the homegroup network. I sort it out, and they dont talk to each other.

Cue another hour of trying to figure out whats going on until I bother to read and actually digest the error message, which helpfully says at the bottom that blank passwords are not allowed. So I set my user account on both machines to use the same password, and blammo, it all works.

On top of this, ninite installer is not 100% awesome, only about 75% as it seems 25% of what I installed didnt install fully/properly and needing reinstalling individually.

GAH.

At least now, for the first time in quite a few years, both computers are fully networked and I can access everything on the other computer here, and print out properly. Only problem now is theyre networked a little too well, with everyone having access from this computer to the computer upstairs. Thankfully only the documents folder it seems!

Hirens BootCD has tools to fix the MBR and reset the admin password - http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

The other option is FixMBR - http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

For fixmbr dont I need to be logged in to the hard drive with the broken mbr though, which is what the issue is?

Will give hirens bootcd a try later on.

You need to use the Recovery Console for fixmbr - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058 - option 2 is probably you.

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Yeah, I can get into recovery console just fine.

The problem is that when you go into recovery console, it asks which hard drive / installation I want to log in to.

I can either log in to the Win 7 hard drive without a problem, or try to log in to the XP drive, which is the problem one, and for which it wont accept the password for.

Hopefully one of the tools on Hirens CD will work. Otherwise from what I can gather you have to phone MS for a customised hotfix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308402

Bah, for some reason the only thing that works on Hirens CD is the ability to bypass the mbr and boot up XP. The menu appears to be all garbled.

am trying http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/ but without much luck yet.


EDIT:

Tried a 3rd CD, one of my old ones, seems to have worked, but unfortunately it looks like most of the tools on Hirens CD pretty much require either a backup of the MBR, or a level of knowledge that is simply beyond me.

I tried the offline password resetter, which for all intents and purposes worked, however the recovery console still is having none of it.

Looks like the option is pretty much to reformat that drive once all the required info is off, and then install XP again.

there is a fixmbr utility that works from within windows.

Ah, the rents seem to be coping with win 7 so far

Referring to this:

http://www.ambience.sk/fdisk-master-boot-record-windows-linux-lilo-fixmbr.php

or something else/better? I guess even if they dont need XP any more I should try and fix it...

Quote from: PeteHirens BootCD has tools to fix the MBR and reset the admin password - http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Wheres the download link?  Couldnt see them...Maybe my specs need a clean..

I couldnt find it but ultimately got it from here:

http://www.hirensbootcd.net/

Be careful what CD/DVD you burn it to, I coastered 2 DVDs before I ended up using one of my 5+ year old CDRs, which did the trick.

Have never had any problems burning hirens ! using alcohol120%
and now the nix one, k3b

the one that works in windows is called mbrfix.exe

I tried it, but it was way over my head RE: the command line I think. Plus I wasnt sure whether itd work given that I have no kind of restore points for the MBR (I got the impression from the options that there wasnt anything to quickly recreate the MBR based on installed OSs..?)