Today I used the Reinstall/Repair boot-XP/Pro OEM Dell CD, when I wanted to repair a serious driver mess I had gotten into. I got as far on the XP Reinstall/Repair CD as the DOS password prompt, but no passwords I tried worked. There are several Admin accounts on this GX240, but none of the passwords satisfied the Repair prompt. I kept getting "3 strikes and you're out" (had to reboot and try again after each 3 missed passwords). I tried all the Admin account passwords, serial numbers on the machine, everything I could think of. No cigars.

The original out-of-box XP Admin account has been deleted a long time ago, and if that's what they wanted, it makes little sense to me.

I looked at Dell support online, and found nothing very useful.

Fortunately, I had Roxio Goback on this machine for insurance, and used that instead to get things fixed. But I'm still miffed about that password obstacle for Repair. I don't have Goback on all the machines I'm an Admin for, I was just lucky on this occasion that I did.

Does anyone know what kind of password the XP Repair feature wants?