Startup Password

After you tried the above solution you should backup your important files and do a reinstall if possible to be sure you have a clean system. Windows XP isnt maintained by Microsoft anymore and so it does not get important security updates which makes it more easy for viruses to enter your system.

If above solution isnt working as the regback files are not good anymore, you can try to restore them from a RECENT backup of your system if you have one. Restoring from an old backup might not help much as the system has changed to much since and registry might not reflect the current configuration anymore.

To reinstall windows, just boot up from your XP-CD, choose the reinstall option. Once it askes for the partitions to install in choose the one that was your previous C drive. and Mark that partition for formating (quick, NTFS) to wipe out all files on that drive prior to reinstall.

If reinstalling is not an option for you you should at least do a malware scan from an anti virus boot CD not from the affected windows itself.

What you see is a startup password that has been configured in the bios of your machine. Depending upon what technology is used, it may be unbreakable.

This is NOT a BIOS password, this is SysKey - a Windows component.

Not that it's any easier to fix though - there are a few exceptional ways to repair this but generally it's too late to undo the damage done.

See https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28526013/Windows-XP-Locked-with-Windows-XP-Startup-Password.html
For similar cases

Correct, syskey. I haven't seen that text for ages...sorry.
Syskey can be reset using the famous boot disk http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ - at least it worked when I last did it. This is also linked in a link of MASQ's link.

What was deleted ,
?
???
?????

Can syskey password be removed with UBCD
?

,
What are steps ,,???
Thanks
- -

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/walkthrough.html are the instructions for the disk I mentioned and syskey is mentioned inside, too.

selected : 1 - Password reset [sam system security]
,
then tried : 1 - Edit user data and passwords ,, got error = SAM registry file is not loaded , !
-


only one available is : 9 - Registry editor, now with full write support!

Did you select the correct partition? Before you get to the "reset password things", you need to load the registry just as the walkthrough shows.

I did now ,, but now I do not see option for :
2 - Syskey status & change

?
?

when I first select Windows partition , next step I see :
-rwxrwxrwx  1  0        0        262144   Nov 17  21:55      SAM


,
?

Step 3 : Password or registry edit ,,

<\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SAM>
,
ROOT KEY at offset : 0x001020 * Subkey indexing type is : 666c <lf>
,,, ,,, ,,, ... ... ...

"when I first select Windows partition , next step I see :  -rwxrwxrwx  1  0        0        262144   Nov 17  21:55      SAM" - do you only see that one line? In the walkthough (also in my experience), you see much more lines. Anyway, at that point you would select "1" for password reset and in the next step "2" for changing the syskey status.

Is that possible?

2 - Syskey status & change , , is NOT available

,
?
?

Maybe you could do a couple of screenshots to illustrate what is going on instead?

get the data out
,,

If you just need the data off loaded can you see it when booting from another system connected to the drive?
If you have encryption it's lost anyway but if you can read the files you should be able to copy them to a safe location even though you may have to change the file permissions/ownership at some point.

can I get data by booting from Knoppix ,
?
?
- - -

If unencrypted, yes. Knoppix can read NTFS.

Thanks,,