[quintessenceanx]

Earlier today a friend of mine brought his computer to my apartment. Frequently his CPU usage went to 100% and stayed there for quite some time, even when the computer was idling. I had him press ctrl+alt+del and see what processes were running, and svchost was taking up all the space. Then I had him organize the processes by name and it turns out he had 5 svchosts (!).

So we went to Symantec's website and obtained the list of the parts that we needed to delete in order to remove the 10.0 Corporate Ed. After removing it I was going to have him boot into safe mode with networking to reinstall the product, then scan for viruses (virii?) to see where the remaining four svchosts came from.

After attempting to boot into Safe Mode by tapping the appropriate F key, and failing, I had him go into msconfig and change to Safe Mode in the BOOT.INI tab. The computer successfully booted into safe mode...

..However his IBM Thinkpad using a finger scan as a "password" when booting into normal mode. This device does not boot when he restarts in Safe Mode, and he has no other Administrator password (or if he does, it is garbage because of a hiccup that occurred in his initial configuration process). I tried doing the F key bit in order to force the computer back into "normal mode", but to no avail. All options (Normal and otherwise) boot his computer into safe mode now.

How would I get his computer into normal mode? I just had an idea to see if we can procure an XP disk perhaps we can change the boot order and use that to boot from, however I don't know if that would prevent it from booting into safe mode, or if it would just use the disk to boot into safe mode again.

Please help???

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reboot your computer using a windows xp disk and enter the recovery console

atthe prompt, type

bootcfg /add

the program will scan your drive for windows installations and give you a choice (in your case, the result will be 1, likely [1]c:\windows)

choose 1
it will ask for a load identifier, type in
temp

it will ask you for load options, type in
/fastdetect

hit enter. Reboot your PC, and you will get a text menu at the beginning. Choose the NEW temp

When you get into windows, edit the boot.ini file to remove the safeboot commands on your default OS...if you do not know how to do that, copy and paste the contents of boot.ini here and someone will show you

[gerryf]

reboot your computer using a windows xp disk and enter the recovery console

atthe prompt, type

bootcfg /add

the program will scan your drive for windows installations and give you a choice (in your case, the result will be 1, likely [1]c:\windows)

choose 1
it will ask for a load identifier, type in
temp

it will ask you for load options, type in
/fastdetect

hit enter. Reboot your PC, and you will get a text menu at the beginning. Choose the NEW temp

When you get into windows, edit the boot.ini file to remove the safeboot commands on your default OS...if you do not know how to do that, copy and paste the contents of boot.ini here and someone will show you

[quintessenceanx]

Set primary boot device to CD, computer still boots into safe mode. Attempted pressing F10/R in order to access Recovery mode during boot, but computer still boots into Safe Mode.

[gerryf]

what kind of windows xp cd do you have? An MS one or some sort of disk created by a system oem?

[quintessenceanx]

I have one by MS that I obtained when I bought my laptop a few years ago (from Dell... )

When I received my computer I received two sets of XP disks. One was a two disk XP set (which I found odd) and a single XP disk. I tried the single disk because it seemed to make the most sense, but all three have the holographic "ooh I'm from Microsoft!" stamp on it.

[quintessenceanx]

Obtained different disk to see if the disk in use was corrupted, and the new disk worked. We are now able to enter the console, but it prompts for and Admin Password before it would (I think) go to the prompt. This is the first screen we see after selecting the recovery console from the previous blue screen.

[quintessenceanx]

Was able to successfully change BOOT.INI. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[gerryf]

glad to hear it, I was not around last night...the password as you discovered (for those coming later) is the administrator password setup when Windows was installed for XP Pro, or the password is blank (meaning nothing) for XP Home

[quintessenceanx]

Ironically what got us into this whole mess is that I was trying to get into Safe Mode to repair his sound drivers and his corrupted administrator password. He said he recalled something happening when he initially set up Windows, and he was never able to repair the Admin password. So one of the things we are tackling today is how to override his Admin password to get into Safe Mode, which he normally circumvents by using his fingerprint scanner.

Thank you for all the help