I am trying to help my sister with her PC she let someone put a pirated windows xp on her pc and now it won't let her to the desktop..Well here is the deal...I put the hard drive in my PC along with my own ok? It worked perfectly in my PC and I was able to reformat it and everything buttttttt you know there is a but in there. As soon as I put it back in the original tower it wouldn't go past this screen saying it was an error and do I want to boot from safe or last known configuration yadda yadda so I picked everything on this list and it won't go to my windows screen for nothing in the world that I tried it keeps going to this screen asking how do I want to boot windows...Well I went on and pressed F2 and of course this system has a password so I pressed enter and Nope nothing I tried to change will let me do it. I am guessing because it has a password on it . So I am hoping that someone can tell me how to disable this password if they know what I am talking about because no one remembers ever putting it on there in the first place. When I go to the screen to pick some thing it says view only (in F2) so it won't let me do nothing but look at the settings but not to change them. Help again I am getting real frustrated with this danggone PC because the hard drive ran perfectly in my PC.

Hi Spicy...

If you installed Windows on her HDD while it was in your machine, you will have to run a Repair Installation with the drive installed in her machine. You will need a valid Product Key for her computer. If it's a brand name machine, there should be a sticker with the code on it somewhere on the case.

The current install is not recognizing the hardware configuration in your sister's machine. You cay end up calling Microsoft to activate Windows after all this is accomplished...and you will likely only be given three days to do so before the computer becomes unusable.

wannabe1

Thank you I will try this