I’m at a hospital at the moment and one of my treatments is ergotherapy. When one of the therapists heard that I’m an IT guy by trade, he asked me to help me with a software problem (Yeah, everywhere I go and tell that I’m in IT I’m asked about computer troubles, that’s just the way it is ;)). As usual in such environments they are working with really old hardware, and except one machine all their PCs still run XP. They are mainly used to run one special, very vintage therapy software called cogpack. I was asked to install it on the only Win 7 machine they recently acquired, but I soon saw that it’s a 16 bit application, so no dice on Win 7. I proposed to wipe Win 7 and install XP instead to be able to install that software and was given green light.
Now, I’ve installed Win XP probably hundreds of times, but it’s been a while. So as usual, I booted from an install CD and started the familiar installation process. I remember that the XP install had a basic partition manager and you had the option to wipe existing partitions and create and format new ones. Somehow this step was skipped this time, and the installation at one point started formatting the system partition (the only partition on the drive) without even prompting (!), which already seemed strange to me. But I thought, what the heck, I’d formatted it anyway, so I proceeded with the rest of installation which went as I’ve known it. Now comes the even stranger part:
The old Win 7 installation had two user accounts, one called “administrator” and one other user, both accounts had administrative privileges. After the installation was completed and the machine rebooted, it skipped the usual step of basic settings including adding a user account, instead it booted to the XP login screen with the two former Win 7 accounts :eek:. The big problem was that I didn’t have the password for the “administrator” account, and the other account I knew the password to and also had admin privileges on Win 7 had been changed to “restricted user”, so the whole installation had been useless because I couldn’t really work with the machine without being administrator.
Now I ask my fellow IT folks here: how is this possible? The old system and seemingly only partition had been reformatted, so where did the system get the old account data from? And how can a XP installation import such info from a former Win 7 installation? When XP was released, Win 7 was seven years in the making, so how could such an import of data even be anticipated? I’m really puzzled about this behavior.
I’m at home this weekend and will return to the hospital on Monday, so as a workaround I plan to bring a bootable CD with Gparted (Unix partition manager) and wipe everything on that machine once and for all and try again to install XP from scratch. I’m confident that this will work, but I still want to know what happened.