I have gotten myself into a very bad situation. I have a laptop PC from someone who used to work at HP. Thier laptop was using a domain and since they left they wanted to change it to use their home network instead of their office network. I thought this would be easy. I changed their configuration from using a domain to using a workgroup, rebooted, then tried to log on and the users password failed. It gets worse. None of the users on the computer work, Administrator wont even log on. So now im stuck on the login screen and can not access ANY resources on the pc. What I have tried so far: Booting with ERD commander and changing passwords. When I got into erd commander It does not even show the users log on name, only hpadmin, hpguest, aspnet, and one other that slips my mind but is also of no concequence. I changed the hpadmin password to "password" and tried logging on with no luck. It would not accept it. Ive tried safemode with the administrator account with no luck either. Log in name or password not correct. Ive tried booting with knoppix linux 3.8. Im able to get in but can not back up the data to my flash drive. It says it can not write to it, i even reformated the flash drive. I have about 108mb of files I need to backup. I dont know how to get around this and would appreciate some help asap! Thanks! There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know binary, and those who don't.

You need to login locally since the machine can no longer authenticate to the Domain. When you're logging in, are you using a local account and changing the login to "computer name (this computer)" rather than the Domain? If this was indeed that person's own PC, then he/she should know the local login info.

Yes I logged into windows under her username for the domain. We werent apart of the domain since she no longer works at HP. I went into the my computer properties and changed simply changed the domain to a workgroup. It asked me to authenticate the changes with an account with correct privelages. I entered Administrator with no password, it accepted it and said the changes would be completed as soon as the computer rebooted. I rebooted and got onto the log in screen. The log in screen was not the traditional windows xp log in, it was the traditional server log in screen (you have to push ctrl+alt+del to enter your un and pw to log on). We tried her username again with the same password shes been using for years but it would not validate. I tried Aministrator, and a few other username and password combinations but it would simply not allow me to log on locally with anything. As I said, I used ERD commander and attempted to change the local passwords. The only users that showed up were as I said before on my last post--her username she had been using was not even among them. I tried to input it mantually and change the password, but it would not do anything when i pushed the NEXT button to finalize the changes. I could reset the passwords it did have listed, so i reset hpadmin, and tried to log in locally again, it still wouldnt accept it. Finally out of frustration I used Knoppix to boot to linux, mounted the laptops hard drive, and tried to backup all her files. Im glad she had them all in one place. I couldnt write to my flash drive because I didnt have writing enabled for my flash drive partition. I finally got it figured out and backed everything up. Now im reinstalling windows xp pro. What the heck did I do wrong? Should the computer have still been connected to hps primary domain controller computer when I attempted to switch the domain to a workgroup? I would very much like to know what I did wrong because im sure something like this will come up again and to my understanding I did everything correctly. Thanks for the help!

actually you didnt do anything wrong, I have done exactly that before with erd commander AND knoppix and it worked. They must have a GPO implemented on the domain that screwed you up as a goabal policy would overwrite the local write if in place. Given that it was HP and they have sensitive data I could see why they would do it. You did right though as it should have worked, I guess the only thing to do would be to back it up first next time, just in case

Thanks man, im glad to hear that. In the back of my mind I was thinking...what if it was a group policy setting....but i wasnt sure, and I didnt know how to bypass it.

you could just run a repair on it and then you wouldn't lose your data... yup!

wasnt sure if that would have worked. Next time ill give it a try.