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I am the family geek so when my dad's coworker's dell inspiron 1000 coughed and died i offered to fix it. After running chkdsk to recover lost files (succesfully) i was able to boot to log on screen. I have their admin pass and i ophcracked the other pass. This being xp i also tried the backdoor and used the real admin account which has no pass.

The problem is that with any of these accounts (be it in safe mode or not) as soo as i hit the enter key after typing password it logs on flashes the desktop backround and promptly logs off.

So what am i to do hear? My dad's freind most likely doesn't have a lot of mony so i was going to reccomend an upgrade to a cheap version of w7 but idk if he will make the upgrade without losing files. (Not losing files is priority here)

Maybe, Try Re-Installing the Windows?

Yes but that will get rid of all of his files won't it?

You can reinstall win without loosing the files, I'm not sure now how, but the files are then located in Windows.old folder.
An upgrade from Vista to 7 can be done without any file loose, from XP to 7 you will need to backup the files some how.

Try running the dos from install CD if possible, and you can then backup the files.

Master is correct. During the dos startup it will ask you whether you want a destructive install or not. You don't choose destructive. You'd either have to reinstall xp or upgrade to vista.

That's strange though. I can't imagine why it'd log itself off. Does it only log itself off when you log onto the Main Administrator account?

I ended up doing the following:

Install XP on new partition.
Copy all information they wanrted to keep to flash drive.
Reinstall XP with destructive install using entire disk and deleting partitions.
Move data back to where it was.

(11-24-2009, 01:35 PM)IllusionSlayer Wrote: [ -> ]I ended up doing the following:

Install XP on new partition.
Copy all information they wanrted to keep to flash drive.
Reinstall XP with destructive install using entire disk and deleting partitions.
Move data back to where it was.

Good to hear.

Message too short.