I had XP Home SP2 OEM installed on an AMD machine, and the power supply died.
I have a P4 machine I would rather use anyway, so I moved the hard drives from the AMD machine to the P4 machine. Of course, XP would not boot.
Without backing up anything, I performed a Repair install (under Setup, not Recovery Console).
At first things looked ok, but eventually, I restarted XP, and a message box informed me that I could not log in until I had activated XP.
Unfortunately, I can't run the activation wizard because I can't log in.
I found I could boot the machine in Safe Mode / Command Prompt, and then could start Windows Explorer from the command line.
I followed some hints I found online: I extracted wpa.dbl from the OEM install disk, and copied it into the Windows\System32 folder, and rebooted. Nothing apparently had changed; I still could not log in to "normal" mode.
I rebooted into Safe Mode / Command Prompt, started Windows Explorer, and installed XP SP3.
Now I can log in to Safe Mode without networking but cannot log in with networking. Normal mode is still unavailable.
When I attempt to start "normally", the message box saying I must activate before I can log in appears. If I say "Yes" to "Activate now?", the desktop background appears (my own JPG shows) - but that's all. The mouse cursor is there, but I've found no
way to access any functionality after that.
I need suggestions for possible fixes that will avoid the need to completely reinstall.
