It has windows XP on it.

When I start it normally, Instead of the screen where you select the user by clicking on their icon http://www.windows-help-central.com/image-files/windows-xp-welcome-screen.jpg It goes directly to the box where you enter the users password, with just a blue background and no cancel option. Like this with nothing but a light blue background http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc94/Dl4All/171fs346018.gif

So the user name that it selects by default is some name... So I tried typing "Administrator" with no password but that does not work either (I read somewhere that it would). So If anyone knows how to bypass that, please tell me.

The annoying part is that I know you can bypass the password by using safe mode, but when I get the DOS menu on startup (start normally, safe mode, etc) The keyboard stops responding. It is a light up USB keyboard and when That menu appears the light goes off so for some reason the pc shuts USB off when it goes to this menu.

I opened up the tower case: It has 2 hard drives in it, a cd drive and a floppy drive.

Now bear with me, I do not know alot about this so I will try to explain.

The floppy drive has a big wide flat data cord that one end plugs into the floppy drive, the other end plugs into the mother board (You probably know what Im talking about).

But, for this cord, there are cords like this for the cd and floppy drive, and there are cords like this for the hard drives. The hard drive ones are a bit wider and there is only ONE place on the mother board to plug a floppy/cd drive size cord.

Since I have already plugged/unplugged the cd and floppy drives, I cannot remember if they were somhow both attatched at the beginning, or if one of them was just sitting there unattatched.

I have a windows xp install cd. I select BIOS to boot frm cd drive first priority, but CMOS does not detect a cd drive.

When I connect the floppy drive, it works, But I do not have a bootdisk for XP (Im assuming it does not use autoexec.bat because my windows 98 bootdisk doesnt work.) and The computer I am using doesnt have a floppy drive to write floppies.

If possible, I would like to be able to go into DOS on startup so that I can still go onto this persons C drive and look around for music, etc to copy onto a portable USB flash disk.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Those flat ribbon cables for the CD and hard drives are IDE cables. Older computers use IDE interfaces instead of SATA. The floppy one is just a floppy cable, it's a different kind of cable entirely.

You need to make sure the drives are plugged in right. New computers are easy, you just plug and play. With the older ones, the cables need to go in a proper configuration. First thing, there should be a red or different colored wire on one edge of the IDE cable. This special colored wire needs to point towards the MIDDLE of the drive. Sometimes it's impossible to plug newer cables in backwards because of a little notch on the end of the cable, but sometimes the cord does not have this notch, so you need to make sure you're plugging it in right.

Another thing you need to worry about is jumper configurations. IDE drives have little plastic jumpers on a little set of pins on the end of the drive. These dictate master/slave configurations. You need to look at the physical drive to see directions on how the jumpers are set, but they should be pre set if the computer was already set up. Anyway, the hard drives are probably set up in a master/slave config, as in, one drive is the primary drive on the cable and the other is the slave. This doesn't really matter, its just how the motherboard sees the drives on the cable.

I wish I could explain this better, but I'm really better at showing someone in person. I learned how to build computers by working on old Pentium II's and shit, so yeah... messing with jumpers and shit can be a real pain.

Anyway, if it's not plugged in to something, it probably should be unless there's no place to plug it into. I can't remember the rule with floppy cables unfortunately, but just mess with the cable config for the floppy until you can get it to work. As for the CD drive, you probably plugged the IDE cable in backwards. Make sure the little red wire is towards the middle of the drive (i.e. towards the power connector), and make sure the jumper settings are all correct. A slave drive will not work without a master also!

I really wish I could explain this better, but I'm better in person and I'm tired right now. Maybe someone else who is experienced with older computers can help clarify.

The annoying part is that I know you can bypass the password by using safe mode,...


I'm too lazy to reboot to test that ...
but I tend to think it's wrong.

Take these hard drives out and install them as slaves in your other computer.
The files may be accessible then.

I'm too lazy to reboot to test that ...
but I tend to think it's wrong.

Take these hard drives out and install them as slaves in your other computer.
The files may be accessible then.
You're quite right - passwords cannot be bypassed by booting into safe mode.

However, once you put the hard drives into another machine and take ownership of the files, you can then view everything.

Take out the hard drives and then put them in your pc and set as slaves, you should be able to view all the files, and these login things when you start windows. Yeah they are used by organizations, schools and the like.

If that bypasses the password, couldnt you go into that drive and delete the applicable password containing/recognizing files?

Just a thought....