I have seen many threads similar to my issue but all have been ABLE to rectify but myself within XP. Boot sector DIED and had the XP CD rebuild it. VERIFIED the boot.ini file but still no good. Can not boot in Safe Mode. Recovery Console does not recognize my Admin password used for my Admin account. I tried a non-destructive reinstall with no joy. I also tried varies data recovery tools on bootable CD's but none can get in "Documents and Settings" becuase access is denied. Long story short....tryied everything. I can slave my drive to a good PC and view the files in Explorer but "access is denied" to all of my files within "Documents and Settings". How can I get to my protected files without loggin into the drive, which is unbootable. I'm UNABLE to change the Simple File Sharing on this drive because I can not log into the NTFS file system as administrator or in safe mode, only view the files as specified above. Ideas?Try This.Boogots - Welcome to the CH forums.

To prevent the Recovery Console setup asking for a password, here's a quote extracted from this site.

Quote

On many XP installations you can't start the Recovery Console because it won't recognize your password. This registry edit causes the Recovery Console not to ask for a password. This works for both XP HOME and XP Professional.

Start | Run | Regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole
Set the DWORD SecurityLevel value to 1
Exit Registry and Reboot