Win 2000 issue

Right on, now's the time to laugh at Vorlin, hehe. I helped a friend install windows 2000 and all related patches about two months ago. All was fine. Several small patches during the interim and nothing's gone wrong. She went on vacation over the past week and her son (a good friend of mine) was surfing on her machine Friday and Saturday. He swears up and down that he didn't do anything except go to several computer parts sites (he's in the case-looking mode) and conversion charts (mm to inches). On Opera, so it wasn't anything through IE downloading, etc.

On Friday, all was fine. On Saturday, he said he couldn't get to any website (that doesn't necessarily mean anything in this problem, but it could be related). He got a rundll.exe fault which popped up the "Send error report?" message, but he didn't think to read it all at the time. The box is then shut down.

Fast forward to today. He tries to start her machine up and at the login prompt, after logging himself in, he gets this message:

"The local security policy on this machine does not permit you to log in interactively."
:eek:

I've done all the looking up I can do and every answer requires either an rconsole or domain admin account to fix. I'm not familiar with rconsole in windows environments nor is this machine on a domain (small network, IP based, nothing extravagant).

What am I looking at doing to fix this? Will a reinstall over the top fix it? Will the repair console do anything? I've found several sites that show fixes, but they're all domain-related from what I've seen.

Thanks in advance!

Use the "Administrator" login and pass, does that work. I assume you do have at least one "admin" account on that box... don't you?

As aeallison mentioned, try using the Administrator account for the box itself if you haven't already. Hopefully, that wasn't the account that was being used full-time. I'm thinking that W2K will see the comp. name as the 'domain' and you should be able to fix the issue once in with the admin account for the box.

Also, the W2K install disc should have a Repair option once you boot from the CD. You may end up having to give that a try.

I never try booting with the Recovery Console but I know it might be password protect. (Probably not by default on 2K) What you might try is to have another W2K or XP computer join the same workgroup that the BAD W2K and try to access it remotly. It'll ask you the login/password from the bad W2K computer and you might be able to access the computer Computer Management Console.. Never try that... Might work? Might not?

Thinking about it, it's probably faster with a recovery console or re-installing :)

First off, I'ma do what no one did and do what Vorlin said we would do:

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Right on, now's the time to laugh at Vorlin, hehe.

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HAHAHAHAAHHAHAHA! :rofl: k, I'm done now. :D Anyways, it's apparent that a trojan (according to my estimation) was installed somehow or he went to a site that had a script-bug. In either chance, you could re-install or boot in safe mode and scan for viruses/trojan's. That would be my first guess. Also:

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Also, the W2K install disc should have a Repair option once you boot from the CD. You may end up having to give that a try.

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Try that, I never used the W2k install disk after installation on my friends laptop, but that could help fix the problem.

Hi,

first try everything that has been already told by others, then if u have not tried group policy/local policy u might want to try that.

Local policy is located in administrative tools

and for group policy type mmc in start>run
then in console click add snap in then choose group policy and then check in the user configuration or in the local policy in computer configuration windows settings. Note this option might not be available since u are not on Domain.

Also U might want to add that particular user to the power users group and try.

MRG.

If you have lost the win2k admin password, you will need to use a crack tool to get it.
For a w2k DC, if you dont have DC admin password:
http://www.jms1.net/nt-unlock.html
Please be aware that you will reset local admin password on W2K server and AFTER boot on DC recover mode
However, if you have more than one DC on that network:
- shutdown all DC server except one
- run crack tools and follow that guide (it works!) on the remain server
- recover DC Admin password
- bring all DC servers back

Congratulations! you have hacked your own servers!

Err.. that's one way to go about it :D however the issue isn't about his admin account's password being lost or stolen. And btw:

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Angelic is Senior member and Im still a little worm :(

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Do you two know each other or something? Just asking.. :)

Well, as messed up as this is going to be, here's what happened after I posted. I received an email from her stating the same thing as you've all already read. I went over there before work, sat down, popped the Win2K CD in and was going to boot into the recovery console. I forgot to hit any key to boot and it went to the regular login, I hit enter just for S&G's and ...

SHIGGITY BLAKOW BOOYAKAS!!!!!!

...it logged in without any problems. I did see the window saying "Applying security policy", then the desktop popped up. We had done absolutely NOTHING. I couldn't log in prior with the administrator account (does this occur when more than one account is considered administrator besides the administrator account?) hence why I brought the win2k cd over.

Weirdest thing I've ever seen. Nothing was done, nothing got changed, nothing was found on virus or spyware scans, nothing...no idea what happened, why it broke, or how it got fixed.

Thanks all for your help though, I've documented most of this to make sure I have notes for later use.

There is a tool called NTrights.exe that allows you to edit user rights from the command prompt, if you can get into the recovery console you can try that

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;279664

couldn't find a download link to it for 2k but this is the 2k3 one, chances are it will still work, as far as I know the a lot of the polcicies are configured in the same way, 2k3 just has extras.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

[edit]
Just seen it has already been fixed, I am too slow, must be getting old
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I couldn't log in prior with the administrator account (does this occur when more than one account is considered administrator besides the administrator account?)

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Having lots of admin accounts is bad practice but does not cause any problems apart from expanding the area of attack for skiddies to try and crack admin passwords as far as I have seen :)

I bet a 2$ he/she lock up the computer with the wrong password for the last 3 days? Someone post that on AO that he lock himself out of is computer for 3 days! I don't remember who it was!