Windows XP has apparently taken it upon itself to give me an administrator password? This is what I was doing at the time: From C:\Windows\Repair, I just did a "Copy Software C:\Windows\system32\config" from the recovery console because of boot problems with my P.C. I was able to access the console just fine. It asked me which O/S I wanted to log on to and I selected the the number one and hit enter. I only have one O/S. It asked me for an administrator password and I just hit enter again and it dropped to the command line and everything was fine. Except for the fact that when I rebooted, the P.C. complained about not having the system file as well. I went back in to recovery console and did the same as above except I copied "System" this time and rebooted. The P.C. complained about lsass.exe, So I decided to copy all five files of the hive from C:\Windows\Repair. The only problem is that when it asks for an administrator password now, It will not accept "enter" as the password. There is no admin password for the P.C. There never has been, and now I can't get in to my own system to finish what I started. Has anybody encountered this problem?

I never had that problem but one of the files you copied was the SAM file which is Security Accounts Manager. I bet there was a forgotten password in there. If you put the HD in a USB External Enclosure and connect it to another PC, you can probably delete the SAM file and start over.

Sometimes Windows just gets messed up. There is a registry setting to control if the recovery console asks for a password or not. Take a look at my post here: http://blog.ryantadams.com/2008/05/... to see how to get around the requirement for a password. -Ryan Adams http://RyanTAdams.com

On many XP installations you can't start the Recovery Console because it won't recognize your password or accept Enter for no password. This registry edit causes the Recovery Console not to ask for a password. This works for both XP Home and XP Professional. Start | Run | Regedit Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole Set the DWORD SecurityLevel value to 1 Exit Registry and Reboot Good luck.

That's good to know. I saved that one for future reference.