Administrator log on - log out 1

[SamuelBiddulph]

When i come to enter the local administrator password the system informs me that it is loading the userprofile then immediatly informs me it is saving the user settings and returns me to he log-on screen. Any ideas? There are no other user accounts set-up, the password entered is correct (if you try any different pasword it actually comes back and says that you cannot log on).

 

[wolluf]

Does this only happen with the Administrator account?
(couple of things come to mind - problem with paging file - would affect all accounts. And, someone has set policy to prevent Administrator account logging on locally. Daft, but possible).

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

There is only the administrator account set-up so can't verify if it would happen with other accounts. The installation is from an image i created off another machine (the login works fine on that one but not from the image).
The administrator policy wasn't changed so i guess it should be able to log-on with no issues - again i'd expect to see some sort of dialog box if it couldn't actually log-on rather than what i appear to be seeing at the moment. Also tried accessing from safe-mode and couldn't get in that way either.

 

[wolluf]

Was the installation on the source machine a normal single partition on a single disk install?

Is the target similar (single hard drive/partition)?

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

The source machine was a single disk with three partitions set-up on it (which is our companies standard configuration). The target machines drive is identical in size and although the image software (powerquest i think it is) does allow you to resize partitions, i left them alone. The actuall source machine for the image and the target machines are identical (all Toshiba Tecra S1 models with same spec)

 

[wolluf]

So where is the pagefile set up on the original system? (which drive). Is the imaging software copying all three partitions at once? My guess is still that somehow on the new installation, the pagefile drive either doesn't exist or is not available for writing to (eg, CD/DVD drive).

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

The pagefile is set to be on drive D, which is basically the windows OS drive (C is a small partition used for DOS). The pagefile isn't set to be deleted after a windows shutdown so i guess i could look (via booting to DOS) to see if it was actually created for the previous attempted session). I'd have expected to have seen a virtual memory warning or something after i had tried to log on if it couldn't create/use the pagefile but then again i'm not sure how windows is set to react when no pagefile can be created at all on first use.

 

[wolluf]

You sometimes get a 'very useful' message telling you there is no paging file, and how to fix this (from within windows, of course!), but other times it just does what you describe. From your description, I'm wondering if on the cloned system, 2k has made the system drive C: when it loads - which would probably make the small partition D: (presumably its too small to house the defined page file).

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

I agree with that one - all the drives have been created at the correct sizes but i guess win2K (depending on when it actually decides to create the pagefile) may be trying to put the file onto the C drive which is smaller than the allocated pagefile size.
I'm doing some more clones this week (i bypassed this problem by using a different clone which puts the system into a state of finishing off a windows install rather that starting with a complete system) and i will see if making the C drive a much larger size allows the pagefile to be created.
Still puzzling though!

 

[Popsea]

I had the same problem but it wasn't related to the pagefile. We were migrating a new location to our network and when we joined our domain we found out that the last network admin for that site had changed all the default security settings, folder security, and global security. We still aren't sure why he even did it. In any case, I couldn't disjoin the domain (Because it wouldn't sign on.) so I had to remove the hard drive, set it as a slave in another computer, set all the correct security and take ownership of the drive as local administrator. It was a mess. Since the PC you cloned is working fine I doubt it is the same problem, but you might want to take a look.

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

At present i've not been able to find a solution to this problem. I re-tried to image a machine that i had (again) sucessfully set-up and i had the same result when using the image. The conculsion that i'm working on at the moment is that windows is not correctly configuring it's resources to know that the D drive is the windows drive. Quite why this may be and exactly what resources it's miss-allocating i don't know. As a matter on interest we have the same configuration of drives for NT machines and this doesn't seem to occur when transferring an image.

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

Back on this - found out some more info. I've now got a Dell machine doing the same thing when using an image a made from it the day before. By connecting to the machine via remote computer management it would appear that the C: and D: drives have switched letters after copying the image back, thus windows loads but then fails to access the resource files it needs and returns me to the login screen after trying to login. According to Microsoft the system and boot partition letters are hard coded so i'm stuck - unless anyone know differently. Unfortunatly there appears to be a few bits of software that'll allow you to change drive letters etc, but of course you have to run them in windows! Bummer.

 

[wolluf]

If you can connect to machine over the network, you should be able to use this -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q223188

(as both regedt32 & regedit can be run on a networked machine's registry).
HTH

 

[SamuelBiddulph]

Nice one! - that seems to be working good now. Worth pointing out that the Microsoft Knowledge Base has several articles saying that system/boot drive letter renaming cannot be done on certain OS's.

 

[dbMark]

Wolluf, I don't know why you never got a star for providing that M$ link so the Win2K system/boot drive letters could be changed back to what the were before mirroring or backup. Here's one for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q223188