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I'm locked out of a Windows-XP PC because of a time difference between the client and the windows domain (controller). I'm trying to solve the issue remotely because the host is two hour's drive away and time/ money matters.

  • there are no local accounts activated
  • there is no on-site IT-staff
  • it's an industrial PC with touchscreen only, so no easy way (for non-IT-guys) to attach a keyboard and access BIOS to change the time
  • same with attaching external cdrom-drive to boot Peter Nordal or whatever
  • remote MMC or registry is not allowed

but:

  • i have write-access to c$ administrative share (which works with domain-credentials from my support-client-VM)
  • i can see the windows logon-mask via VNC

There was a time/ntp-related problem on that machine about a year ago, which back then i resolved by putting a batch-file on C:\ that manually ran "w32tm /resync". However, somehow that batch-file doesn't seem to be processed anymore. A "echo foobar > C:\time.txt" I now put in that batch for debugging followed by a reboot doesn't lead to the creation of a time.txt in C.

I am now looking for a way to somehow get my little time-sync command to be run when Windows starts to re-enable login with domain-credentials.

  • I know c:\autoexec.bat is not longer processed at startup
  • I tried c:\windows\system32\autoexec.nt but it seems to be not executed
  • I tried c:\windows\winstart.bat which seems not to be executed, too

I also thought about editing the physical registry-hive files, but AFAIK the system writes them at shutdown, copying its "memory-state" of the registry to those files, which would overwrite any changes i make to them. (Maybe a power-off would do the trick - but that's kinda crude and therefore -if at all- last option.)

So - does anyone know a way to make the system run commands at startup that i can configure using just access to c$-share and a text-editor or whatever? Or maybe another way to gain back access without physical intervention? Maybe somehow creating a local user?

Thanks in advance!

0 Answers0