Turned off PC after starting windows repair disk. How bad is the news?

[fastline]

Friend of mine bought a piece of CNC equipment that runs a PC based control system. Basically Win2K OS, with their proprietary software loaded to it. Apparently my friend did not get login credentials.

We attempted to use ERD Commander 2000 to edit the password and get going. This was burned to a DVD and proved to work on another Win2K system perfectly. However, on this system, with an Advent Bios, it would hang up during "loading DVD ROM".

So as a simple test, I put in a Win2K repair disk just to see if it would take it. It sure did and prompted for what I wanted to do. Friend of mine decided to take this a step further and invoke the "repair sequence" in which it started copying some files, then asked for the Admin password. Well, we don't have that! duh....

So he just turned it off...... Now it boots normally, brings up windows screen, says it is loading, then hangs up with the blue screen of death mentioning something about a memory issue.

I am pretty frustrated because he just made this fix 10x harder! As well, this system is old and NOT repairable so if we cannot repair the OS and gain access without wiping the program that is on it, this becomes a massive issue!!!

I have a very sharp mind working on the problem right now but he doesn't do this stuff everyday anymore and wondering if you guys have any thoughts or ideas?

 

[hang-the-9]

You need to do a full clean setup of Windows on the system, not a repair, then install whatever software is on the system. You can't just contact the place you got the system from and ask them for the password they put on it? No-one should sell a system they don't have a password for if needed.