Safe Mode Passwords Blocked

JLK03F150 · April 14th, 2009, 10:36 AM

A coworker brought in their nephew's notebook again for me to clean up. It's running XP SP3 with AVG 8 and Spybot. He somehow managed to install Norton - which isn't updated, along with XP Anitvirus2009 (again). I can't tell how many other bugs are running because it's using all of its 768MB of RAM and is just unresponsive.

Here's the new part. Booting to Safe Mode, the keyboard is disabled! I'm unable to type in the Admin or User pwd's. Anyone else seen that one?

Time to format & install & update & update & update... again.

From what I understand, he isn't getting it back this time. lol

osprey4 · April 14th, 2009, 11:16 AM

Usually there is one USB port that is active during boot regardless of drivers. You just need to find it.

Have you tried booting with the XP disc?

JLK03F150 · April 14th, 2009, 12:59 PM

Yeah, I booted the notebook with the Toshiba Win XP disk & the HDD is being formatted now.

I've just never seen typing disabled in Safe Mode to keep you from entering the passwords. You could enter the password on a normal boot, but there was so much viral activity you couldn't do anything once you logged in.