Windows XP Home installation- is this an error or what? ?

Question

I'm helping my cousin with his XP problem (he's in the USA, I'm in Glasgow, so I'm doing this over Skype). Anyway, he had a problem with a XP Pro installation and didn't want to lose his files, so he installed XP Home along side it so that when the PC starts up he can pick between Pro or Home. The idea was that he'd go into home access his files, back them up and then reformat the HD. He says that the installation went smoothly but when he tries to log into XP Home he gets the following error message: "The system can't log you on due to the following error: The specified domain doesn't exist or can't be contacted. Please try again or consult your system administrator." All the times that I've installed Windows, I've never seen such an error- what did he do, did he somehow skip the part that creates an administrator password and assign himself as a non-admin user? Any advice on how to get around this? Thanks.

Answer 1

May I suggest something to you ??

You are communicating over Skype.

I have here a program for you, You can take over the computer of your friend in the USA legally.

It is called Crossloop

It is really a great program, because from Glasgow, you can see his desktop and transfer and copy files.

http://www.download.com/CrossLoop/3000-2...

Answer 2

When you receive the "The specified domain either does not exist or

could not be contacted." error message this is telling you that you

are using the correct set of CACHED credentials but when the machine

tries to authenticate them against its SAM user accounts it fails.

This is usually due to a SAM corruption. The SAM is the location where

all local usernames and passwords are stored.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/securit...

You might have a slightly problematic machine.

You may be best off giving your laptop to a PC engineer to look at.

Alternatively you should look at this document

http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administra...

and you may be able to reset the passwords, however with a possibly

broken SAM database you could be trying to flog a dead horse.