Mberg wrote:
> I am in a little predicament. An old tech who worked here put
> policies on 24 windows xp machines and now when problems arise I
> cant troubleshoot anything because everything is locked down. I
> dont know if he used a third party software or policies from
> windows xp. Also the admin account does me no good. Supposedly he
> had a cd that I guess you could boot with and restore the system
> but I cant find it. Currently I am unable to go to c:, the
> registry, control panal, the run command and everything else
> needed to get in. Am I dead in the water or is there something I
> can do to reset this nightmare.

Malke wrote:
> 1. Consult with your corporate counsel as to whether you should
> contact your local law enforcement organization.
>
> 2. Consult with your corporate counsel as to whether you should
> take legal action against your old tech.
>
> 3. Anything you get from the old tech at this point will be suspect
> and you have no idea if he left any backdoors. Therefore you should
> flatten those workstations and reinstall Windows. Hopefully the
> hardware will be the same so you can just do one and image the
> rest. Even if some of the hardware is different, check out the
> Enterprise products at Acronis because I believe you can restore to
> different hardware with Universal Restore; perhaps whatever imaging
> software you use can do this too.
>
> Since you presumably have been following best practices and no data
> is saved locally on the workstations, it should only take you a day
> to flatten, rebuild, image, apply image to 23 other workstations. A
> pain, but not the end of the world.

Malke,

Aren't you *assuming* the old tech did this maliciously? This may have been
the way they locked machines down, period. I have been to places like that.
Also - you are assuming the 'old tech' didn't up and die (literally) and
that is why this new tech finds themselves in this position. ;-)

Mberg,

I would say - overall, I agree with Malke - you would probably be better off
flattening the systems and making them your own in any case. Troublesome?
Yes. Time consuming - pretty much - but I think you would spend less time
building these machines up from scratch/imaging them than trying to figure
out what the undocumented parts are.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html