windows xp lost admin and all hardware

Hi folks, if anyone knows wht i did, please help. I am running xp 2000 service pack 3
i recently had a drive crash due to a currupt driver. I removed the drive, tried a few other drives to see if it might be a motherboard issue. i put the drive in another tower as a slave, and replaced the currupt file. all works and the drive fires up, and opens windows. I now have no admin privileges, all hardware does not work, even though it says all working properly. there are no users that appear in users, and it does no longer give me an option to do add another one. there is many errors that pop up when trying to install hardware, as I dont have permissions.
Anything I can do, anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Troy

 

Honestly you will find little support for this question due to the old OS. Some of us elder geeks may be able to help.
1) full system specs please
2) are you running XP or 2000?
3) can move to Win 7 or 2003 server?
4) what does the system do? (file server, mail server, workstation, etc)
5) have you run chkdsk for all drives?

We will try to help, but I reiterate you need to upgrade your OS if at all possible.

 

Was the corrupt file residing in Windows\system32\config?


I have an inkling it was.

 

no, it was in the same directory, but was in /drivers/ it was gag30kx.sys


i found it online,put it on another computer, slaved the offending hard drive, and replaced the file that it was hanging up on. . this made the computer work again, but all admin features are disabled, will not allow new hardware to be installed, and if I right click on many properties many things are disabled, or just dont work. It wont allow me to drag and drop icons on the desktop. when trying to get the audio to work again, all of the dropdownd are greyed out. I hope this helps. I have unistalled all hardware also, to see if my audio card or my wifi was causing the partial failure.

 

agreed. I think that I would have to change the processor out to upgrade. I might just have to slave it, and recover from there. I hope not. there are many programs i run that are made for xp

Running Xp with Service pack 3
Main prcessor :AMD 64x2 Dual Core 3800
Memory:2030592k
Hard drive is a 4ogig Barracuda 2200-7
I hope this helps. How do I run a checkdisk?

 

Not entirely sure how you will recover those permissions safely. You destroyed them when accessing the drive from another computer.


You can modify them if you have admin access, but only if. Did you see if Safe Mode has admin access?

 

Save mode does, but eveything does the same thing in admin, when logged into safe mode.
you said "You destroyed them when accessing the drive from another computer." This is obviously what happened , and thanks. I have done this sucessfully before, so I did not know that this could happen. So, then , i should now start searching for ways to recover permissions. Thanks for your help.

 

try cacls:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490872.aspx

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/w2k3/utilities/cacls.htm

 

I will, and thanks for the help. this is a bit beyond my scope, but i think I do this buy going to run /CMD and then typing in CACLS , from there I am not quite understanding. If you understand these, please help. It would appear that I need to then set all permissions to "gamer" which appears to be the username of the user that it automatically logs into on startup. Do you know what I would then topye in to get this to set all permissions to that username? Thanks.

 

Well, lets take a simpler approach first. Have you tried making a new user account?

 

The traditional way. Icons do not appear to create one, and none show in the /user account area of the control panel. like all of the functions are
disabled

 

Go to start, run, and type control userpasswords2

Or if you need keyboard shortcut, winkey+r.

 

Ok, I did this. the first thing I did was change the admin password. this brought up the admin icon on startup, along with the Gamer icon. I could log in to gamer, but admin would not allow me to log in, pop up said user restricted acess. it was the correct pass, as entering an incorect password just put me in the "forgot your password" loop. then it brought me back to the login page. I logged in tho the gamer account, and repeated that, this time giving "gamer" admin priveledges. this took me to a log in page that only had the administrator icon, gamer had disappeared. Logging in, brought me back to the same error of restricted access. restarted the puter, takes me to a login screen, with no icons at all. LOL, i really screwed things up !

 

I am VERY rusty on this subject and even this OS version.

Try taking ownership of Windows folder and see if you can then get into the admin account with full rights.

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-vista/taking-ownership-file-or-folder-command-line

Try it from Safe Mode.