Minlogon Gone Wrong

**zzzBrett** · 10-07-2007, 08:17 PM

I somehow went wrong with minlogon.. I'm not sure what i did wrong, as i had it working for a little, but then i made a registry change and boom - When i boot into windows, whether its safemode or not, i just get the default xp background screen. No taskbar, no icons, no RR. Control alt delete doesn't work, so i'm not sure what to do. Is there a way to revert the damages i've done with minlogon? I've got a back up of the registry on my c: root, but can't get to that either.

Any ideas? If no suggestions by tomorrow i think i'll have to reformat, its hard driving without music

Thanks!

**nst6563** · 10-07-2007, 08:30 PM

Do you have a Windows PE bootdisk? If not, go to http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ and download the BartPE builder and follow the instructions. Just a basic WinPE boot disc will allow you to do whatever you need to do to recover. Whether that be replace minlogon with the original Winlogon, or revert the registry change (which key did you change anyway?).

BartPE is a free utility that will use your existing WindowsXP or Server2003 install files to build a Windows PE-like recovery disc. I believe you can also get it to load onto a USB thumbdrive and boot from that, however unless things have changed from a couple years ago, it was both slow and required some 'trickery' in order to work decent.

**marshallh** · 10-07-2007, 09:43 PM

Boot your Windows XP CD and use the recovery console.

Code:

cd C:\windows\system32
ren winlogon.exe minlogon.exe
copy C:\windows\system32\dllcache\winlogon.exe C:\windows\system32

That will get your original winlogon file back. If you can boot to a desktop (it will be a different account) that's a start.

**zzzBrett** · 10-08-2007, 11:17 AM

Alright, so i made a USB flash drive bootable, but am having trouble booting it with my carpc. I can't get into a boot menu or a bios, i'm tapping f1-f7 and f-9-f12, what key is it to get into the bios!?!

**nst6563** · 10-08-2007, 11:23 AM

try "DELETE"??

**zzzBrett** · 10-09-2007, 09:36 AM

Delete worked!

I think i figured out whats wrong. When i reinstalled roadrunner with the new installation, it looks like it uses RoadRunner.exe as the main program's executable instead of rr.exe, which i used as my startup registry value - thus nothing started up on bootup. While trying to fix it, i managed to boot with linux and mount the windows drive to try deleting minlogon.exe, but now i'm going to have to restore it somehow.. is there a backup of the normal winlogon.exe somewhere in the windows file system? I can't figure out how to get a file off my usb drive when i'm usb booting a linux distro. But if i can minlogon / winlogon somewhere in the current filesystem, i can simply copy it back into the system32 directory.

Thanks,
Brett

**nst6563** · 10-09-2007, 12:29 PM

Check out the code snippet in Marshallh's post. Last line should have the location of the original winlogon.exe. If it's around 491k I believe that's the one you're looking for, Minlogon is a lot smaller...I think my minlogon.exe was 17k.